By Armand Pantalone, Director of EW/Radar Test Solutions
Mike Penta, VP of Sales and Marketing, Giga-tronics

Nearly every single Military Tactical Radar program, whether well-established and fielded for many years  or under development today, needs an RF Target Generator (RTG) and Electronic Warfare (EW) Simulation test capability. The relevant questions are “How quickly can we get one?” and “Should we Build or Buy?”. The same is true for every Radar Jammer/ EW program which needs a capability and testing environment to stimulate the EW system and provide  a means to test and evaluate the EW system function and performance.

Costs of specifying, designing, building or buying complex microwave test solutions can have a significant impact on maintaining existing defense contracts and winning new contracts for EW and Radar programs.

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By Larry Desjardin, Modular Methods

In part 1 of my series, Why do users buy test gear? I asked the question What are the business drivers of the end user that compels them to spend billions of dollars of their hard earned money each year on test equipment?

In that column, I observed that test and measurement is largely a derivative industry to the entire electronic product industry, and that test gear is purchased because a manufacturer or service provider needs it for its own success. I also shared a segmentation model, Figure 1. An electronic product flows through the lifecycle vertically from R&D to manufacturing to service, and the test requirements change as it moves.

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