AR Europe is proud to announce their new exclusive distribution agreement with Eastern Optx, a New Jersey based company that designs and manufactures fibre optical delay systems. This new product line includes radar target simulation systems, radio altimeter test sets and channel replicators.

The Eastern OptX products are available for the European market through the AR Europe sales channels from December 1st 2012.

At present this agreement applies to the entire AR Europe channel excluding the German and Italian markets.

With its fibre optical delay line technology, Eastern OptX provides an efficient solution to the market where transmission delays are required without having the need to perform these tests in real field situations.

The fibre optical technology has a many great advantages, one of the most important is the enormous bandwidth (40 GHz) in which signals can be delayed. This allows users of broadband systems such as frequency hopping or wide-band multi channel radar systems to receive, delay and retransmit the received signal without tuning replication systems.

As most fire and control radar systems are looking for incoming targets, the Eastern OptX delay lines can be fitted with Doppler modulators that provide the reflected pulse with a simulated speed. Without this option, many of these systems neglect echoes. As the target simulator uses low-loss optical fibre to create the distance between the radar and the target, there is almost no difference between the amplitude of a close by and far away target reflection. To create a more real world simulation, the system can be fitted with an optional variable attenuator that varies the level of reflection as a function of the distance.

Another solution provided by Eastern OptX is the radar altimeter test set. This is also a fibre optical based system and is used in the calibration procedures for altimeters. This products wideband capabilities offer some great advantages especially in cases where the new LPI (Low Probability of Intercept) Radio Altimeters are used in Military applications such as helicopters and UAVs. These wideband, spread spectrum like signals can easily be handled by EastenOptX delay lines where IF based system suffer in frequency agility.

Eastern OptX radar altimeter test

To test radio network connections, Eatern OptX’s channel replicator system offers a simulation capability for a multi-radio network allowing reliability testing of the communications network for propagation effects and to test multi vendor interoperability.