Looking for a simple test setup for RP SMA antennas.

We ship several hundred antennas yearly for our XBee-Pro based products. We have had a lot of field failures using one particular vendors 1/2 wave dipole. It would be nice to have a simple test setup that would provide a crude quantitative number relating to the quality of the antenna under test.

Hi Lynn,

Are you looking for a remote solution or an in house test solution?

Perhaps a simple in house solution would be to remove two of the XBee-Pro units from your products and connect each of them to a XBIB-U board.

You could then use the range test feature in our XCTU program and perform a range test by powering them up and comparing the results to your known good antennas.

Obviously if the antennas are failing you would see very poor RSSI figures.

You can see an example of the range test feature in the video here http://youtu.be/EA-2Xa5OAY8?t=2m10s

You can find out more about the XCTU program here http://www.digieurope.de/products/wireless-wired-embedded-solutions/zigbee-rf-modules/xctu

Your account manager should be able to get you pricing on the XBIB-U boards.