Phased Array Radar T / R Module Automatic Test System Research And Implementation

This paper describes the importance and practicality to form an automatic test system for phased array radar's T/R modules. According to performance parameters test requirements of phased array radar's T/R modules, we make a deep study of microwave measurement principles and network measurement principles, analyze the operation principles of the microwave vector network analyzer, have a good knowledge of several functional configurations of HP8510C vector network analyzer, and successfully use a vector network analyzer to accomplish the measurement of microwave pulse high power signals. On this basis, a design scheme for software and hardware of the automatic test system for phased array radar's T/R modules is presented.Hardware configurations of the automatic test system for T/R modules is achieved by reasonably selecting programmable measurement instruments according to the measurement requirements and then integrating them with the T/R module to be tested by a programmable switch matrix.The master computer finishes the automatic test of the whole automatic test system by use of the programmed software, gains each performance parameter, which are required for the measurement of the T/R module, via instrumented IEEE-488 bus, and automatically process and print the measurement data.In this paper, both error sources of the automatic test system and error correction principles of modern programmable microwave instruments are also analyzed. Error correction technique is used to make the system error within the allowed range so that system test accuracy is greatly increased.