Measuring Receiver Benchmark for Conducted and Radiated Emissions Testing in Space Applications

This paper compares the measurement results obtained from three different implementations of measuring receivers regarding spectral level accuracy. The objective is to validate the suitability of direct sampling electromagnetic emissions measurements with respect to those delivered by a high-end EMI receiver in frequency swept and FFT modes. The experimental setups follow the verification methods described in the ECSS-E-ST-20-07C Rev.2 standard to set realistic and reproducible conditions. Between 50 kHz and 100 MHz, common mode and differential mode currents are measured when multi-sine excitation signals with controlled amplitude profiles are used as references. Subsequently, conducted and radiated emissions tests are run to investigate the correlation between measurements with the different receivers. The instruments used are a low-cost USB digitiser Picoscope PS5444D, a high-performance benchtop oscilloscope R&S RTO6 and the R&S ESW44 full-compliant EMI test receiver. The analysis concludes that the emissions measurements performed with the direct sampling approach are excellent for the intended application, exhibiting an accuracy comparable to the dedicated EMI test receiver and a well-adequate dynamic range and noise level.