Requirements for Remote RF Laboratory Applications: An Educators' Perspective

This paper discusses the results of a study of the requirements for developing a remote RF laboratory. This study draws on the perspectives of educators in university electrical engineering departments and in technical colleges, on the teaching of the radio frequency (RF) domain. The study investigates how these educators would like the technical content of a state of the art RF laboratory to be designed. As far as the authors know, no publication exists in the literature that investigates the requirements and needs of remote laboratories in that particular field. The outcomes of this work are expected to guide remote laboratory platform developers towards the most effective design of their platforms. The analysis of the results showed that educators would like the technical content of the laboratory to cover basic communication techniques, microwave circuits and devices, antennas and propagation, RF technology, and radio system design aspects of modern telecommunication systems. They would therefore like the laboratory instrumentation to be designed to that end. The educators also reported the need for advanced experimental setups which require expensive RF measurement devices. The discrepancy between university and technical college views was also considered in this paper.