STATE-OF-THE-ART AUTOMATIC TEST SYSTEM FOR MULTIACCESS RURAL RADIO SYSTEM

The development of a high-performance automatic test system (ATS) for multi-access rural radio (MARR) equipment is presented in this paper. The backbone of this test system is the AT-GPIB interface board which offers both software and hardware advances for the GPIB instrumentatio n interface. This low-cost and high-performance IEEE 488 interface has been integrated with low-cost but powerful 80386 and 80486 based IBM PC/AT compatible computers that have 16-bit plug-in slots to build ver y powerful but cost-effective instrument controllers. The test package s have been developed using Microsoft's DOS 5.0 and C 6.0 in order to achieve high portability and high throughput of testing. The test syst ems are not only cost-effective but have also led to improvements in t he quality of the equipment produced.