They serve to locate and identify potential sources of interference within the building blocks of electronic assemblies.
The probes act similar as wide bandwidth antennas, picking up radiated emissions from components, PCB traces, housing openings or gaps and from any other parts that could be emitting RF. The probes are usually connected to a spectrum analyzer. Scanning the probe over the surface of a PCB assembly or housing quickly identifies locations which emit electromagnetic radiation. By changing to a probe with smaller size, the origination of the emissions can be further narrowed down.
Additional applications are RF immunity tests by feeding a RF signal into the probe and radiating it into potentially susceptible circuit sections: Furthermore the probes can be used in the field of repair or debugging to track down issues in RF signal chains by contactless measurement of RF signal levels. One more application is non- invasive measurement of RF building blocks such as modulators or oscillators. Frequency, phase noise and spectral components can be measured in conjunction with a low noise preamplifier.
The TBWA2/20dB and TBWA2/40db wideband amplifiers are connected between EMC probe and Spectrum Analyzer to increase the dynamic range of the measurements.
