The Research & Implementation Of General Test Platform For VHF Navigation Equipment

At present, the new generation of Automatic Test System(ATS) in our country has entered the stage of standardization. Before it goes into the practical stage, it is necessary to do some useful study in theory and engineering practice on its principles and performance.Therefore, some key technical issues of general-purpose automatic test system are researched.In order to achieve commonality of ATS, the research is expanded at three key issues which are the modular and open hardware platform; the portability of TPS and interchangeable instruments. By studying the latest international IEEE1641 standard and ATML standard, applying virtual instruments, IVI, and XML technologies, analyzing the testing requirements of VHF navigation equipments, a suit of common automatic test platform which has open architecture is set up.The hardware platform of this common ATS is built as PXI bus form. This pattern is benefit for using virtual instrument technology to extend functions of PXI equipments.Therefore the modular and scalable of hardware platform is guaranteed. The problems of instruments’ interchangeability and TPS’s portability can be completely solved by utilizing IEEE1641 standard and ATML standard to implement signal-oriented software platform. The common software platform which uses hierarchical structure is consist of test information description software, test program development software and test program execution software.The description of signal-oriented test system is a series of XML documents, including test description, equipment description, test station description and UUT description, which is the basis for development test programs. The ATML description documents’ parser is developed by LabVIEW software and is able to accomplish the allocation of test resources and the generation of TPS. Employing TestStand software can integrate one UUT’s TPS, generate test sequence file, run and debug the test program and output test results.The research method and test validation can provide reference for the engineering development and theoretical research of automatic test systems.