Development and Evaluation of Waveforms for EMI Radiated Susceptibility Testing of Avionic Systems

Recommended waveforms used for electromagnetic interference (EMI) susceptibility testing of military avionic systems date to 1967, and are not representative of modern telecommunication standards: characteristics such as the bandwidth and the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) are not emulated. Although more recent studies have evaluated the use of filtered white Gaussian noise for susceptibility testing, and compared the effects of the PAPR on EMI susceptibility, the results were inconclusive. This paper proposes a parameter reduction process for the development of candidate waveforms that are representative of long term evolution (LTE) communication signals. The waveforms were evaluated by comparing the measured EMI response of avionic equipment that was exposed to the waveforms in an anechoic chamber. The measured data was analyzed to determine whether the bandwidth and the PAPR had significant effects on the measured EMI compared to real LTE signals. The proposed method can be used to evaluate the suitability of test waveforms for other communication standards.