A system for the test of a space electronics device

This paper describes the design of a test system that is used to test a power conditioning unit that has been developed for a new generation of commercial telecommunications satellite. The paper details how the various problems associated with test of this space electronics product were solved, end how by mixing both manual and automatic test capabilities within the test system design. It has been successfully used as a fool for engineering development tests and production testing. The test system leverages heavily on the use of commercial instruments and software. The system controller is an 80486 based PC operating under MS Windows 3.1. An extensive graphical user interface (GUI) was developed using Visual Basic 3.0 with a custom dynamic link library created using Borland C++. A suite of commercial IEEE 488 controlled instrumentation is interfaced to the device under test through custom designed interface circuitry.