Anritsu was founded in 1895 in Japan under the name of Sekisan-sha and then established as Anritsu Electric Corporation in 1931. With approximately 4,000 employees in twenty countries and sales volume surpassing 94,000 million yen, Anritsu is now a global company offering a wide array of cutting edge products and services in the R&D, manufacturing, sales and maintenance of testing and measurement instruments for the telecom industry.
We had the pleasure to meet and speak with Thomas Bell, Senior Product Manager for Anritsu, at the Mobile World Congress this year and get a snapshot of how network evolution is changing the way carriers need to test their equipment.
TowerXchange: Thomas, nice to meet you at MWC! Please introduce yourself to our readers
Thomas Bell, Senior Product Manager, Anritsu:
I have been involved in base station antenna manufacturing since 1995 and with Passive Intermodulation testing since 1997. At that time, we were working with this test from the manufacturing side and since 2009, I have been active in the field to help transition this knowledge to the practical field side.
Currently, Anritsu is selling the PIM Master in Latin America, Africa, Europe and South East Asia along with North America and we have been globally successful.
TowerXchange: Please tell us about your products and their evolution in the past few years
Thomas Bell, Senior Product Manager, Anritsu:
At Anritsu, we have been selling the Site Master for years now as a tool to verify installation quality. It does so by measuring reflections in the RF path. Eliminating reflections caused by kinked cables or poorly made RF connections improves transmission efficiency, allowing more energy to make it through the antenna feed system and into the sector.
Today, we are also concerned about noise or interference generated by the transmitted signals as they pass through the RF infrastructure. Self interference known as Passive Intermodulation, or PIM, can be generated by very simple things such loose RF connectors or corroded parts. This has been known in the industry for a long time as the rusty bolt effect. If components are somehow damaged or if RF connectors aren’t properly tightened, this can jeopardise performance.
The Site Master is a great tool for identifying reflections, but a different test instrument is required to identify PIM. The PIM Master was developed to perform this test and identify the location of components that need repair.
TowerXchange: Why is the Site Master not enough anymore?
Thomas Bell, Senior Product Manager, Anritsu:
LTE deployments are the main driver for PIM testing. The performance you get from an LTE system is dependent on the signal to noise ratio. The stronger the signal is compared to the noise, the faster the data can be transmitted.
PIM that falls in an operator’s uplink band acts as interference and increases the noise floor. Carriers can set up a state of the art LTE network but if they don’t tighten and clean every RF connection the whole system can run at a few MB per second instead of 20MB per second.
PIM testing is a necessary investment for operators that want to get maximum performance from their LTE network. Passive Intermodulation testing is not new and has been a requirement for component manufacturers since 1997. Now we have portable test instruments capable of making this measurement in the field. This allows carriers to measure the passive intermodulation of the assembled RF path, to make sure it is good enough to support LTE.
Operators typically start off by purchase a few sets of PIM test equipment for their technicians to help de-bug PIM problems in the field. Within a few months, they usually determine that they are fixing problems on brand new installations. Soon after that, PIM testing usually becomes a site acceptance test for all new installations.
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Companies don’t want to invest billions to then realise that a loose connection is slowing down the speed rate, right?
There is a lot more awareness now in the industry regarding the impact of PIM on LTE network performance. Operators now often plan for PIM testing as part of their LTE deployment strategy and include funds to cover the testing in their capital budgets.
TowerXchange: In which markets is the PIM Master in demand?
Thomas Bell, Senior Product Manager, Anritsu:
North America has been the market with the largest demand for Passive Intermodulation Testing in light of the advanced status of 4G LTE deployments and the availability of portable PIM test solutions since 2009. In North America, the LTE networks have been deployed at 700MHz, which is highly susceptible to PIM interference and carriers have to be extra conscious regarding their data rates due to competition. To date, the PIM Master is a standard test for the majority of carriers in North America.
However, carriers worldwide need to realise that VSWR testing doesn’t exclude Passive Intermodulation and viceversa. Any system planned for LTE should be tested both ways to ensure coverage, signal strength and the desired speeds are achieved. Companies don’t want to invest billions to then realise that a loose connection is slowing down the data rate, right?
