Spirent, SATIMO Team for Over-the-Air Testing

SATIMO’s SAM Antenna Measurement Software now supports Spirent’s UMTS Location Test System (ULTS) and CDMA Position Location Test System (PLTS) for A-GPS Over-the-Air (OTA) testing.

The combined solution of Spirent’s A-GPS test implementation and SATIMO’s multi-probe antenna measurement system advances the development and testing of A-GPS enabled mobile devices in several important ways, according to the companies. They include:

• Extending the capability of SATIMO’s existing cellular OTA solutions to include GPS antenna performance
• Delivering greater accuracy and reliability to A-GPS testing
• Providing support for multiple air interface technologies including GSM, W-CDMA and CDMA.
• Enabling the testing of A-GPS enabled devices in full compliance with the 3.0 release of the CTIA’s Test Plan for Mobile Station Over-the-Air Performance which was published in early May.

Adding a GPS antenna to a densely packed mobile device form factor can be a major challenge. Because the industry’s existing certification standards for A-GPS do not include OTA testing, GPS antenna performance issues are not always caught prior to commercial deployment. This has led the CTIA to broaden the scope of its existing Test Plan for Mobile Station Over-the-Air Performance to include A-GPS.

The ULTS is the first commercially available UMTS A-GPS test system.