5G testers get update for coastal and mountainous terrain

For coastal and mountainous terrain, Anritsu has added an up-link interference measurement to its some of its portable 5G and LTE TDD testers.

At issue are stray signals carried long distances into cells where they interfere with the TDD up-link.

The company explained:

For 5G networks with a coastal or mountainous terrain, RF down-link transmissions readily become subject to atmospheric tropospheric ducting. Signals can travel hundreds of kilometres, resulting in a time offset relative to the far-end base station. The result is down-link power masking the up-link signals from user equipment. It is also essential that there is a common frame slot format deployed on all operator networks in a country, and ideally at international borders. The new up-link interference measurement includes configurations for the common frame slot formats recommended by international standards organisations, including GSMA, ITU-R and ECC/CEPT.

Tester MS2090A (for FR1 and FR2 frequency bands) and MS2080A (FR1 only networks) can be modified to include the new test, via a software update, which provides a dual display of the LTE or 5G frame structure with automatic placement of gates on the up-link slots alongside the RF spectrum of the gated time slots.