Agilent Technologies has announced several new integrated attenuation control units with as much as 121-dB attenuation from DC to 26.5 GHz. The LXI-compliant instruments are suitable for research and manufacturing test, especially for engineers tasked with designing, validating, and manufacturing WiMAX and WLAN components, as well as for mobile handset base transceiver station (BTS) handover test. Attenuation can be added in steps or programmed by means of a sweep function according to user-defined sweep times, attenuation values, and number of test cycles.
Agilent's J7211A/B/C attenuation control units allow operators to set the desired start/stop attenuation, step size, dwell time and sweep time of each measurement based on specific application requirements. They exhibit less than 0.03-dB insertion loss repeatability over a 5-million switching-cycle lifetime. The LXI Class C compliance allows remote control over a local area network (LAN), and the instruments also include GPIB and Universal Serial Bus (USB) connectivity for automatic-test-equipment (ATE) applications.