OB-PAL-5 In Stock

The Spirent OB-PAL-5 is a Pal Wi-Fi Test Instrument designed to provide comprehensive testing capabilities for throughput, capacity, and device functionality. With its versatile features, this instrument serves as an expert analyzer, traffic partner, virtual station emulator, and load generator. It offers extensive control options and can function as a expert monitor, sniffer, load generator, traffic generator, access point, stations, and virtual stations for various tests, including throughput, forwarding rate, roaming, mesh/IoT, and band steering, among others. The OB-PAL-5 can act as a real, adaptable device to monitor the behavior of devices under test and qualify their MCS adaptation behavior.

The OB-PAL-5 can be used as a stand-alone instrument or within the controlled RF environment of the octoBox wireless testbed. It enables the creation of compact and powerful testbeds, facilitating the execution of a wide range of automated tests. Compatibility is ensured with three different test beds: octoBox, STACK-BENCHTOP, and STACK-SNB. When used with the octoBox wireless personal testbed, the OB-PAL-5 significantly reduces test time from weeks to hours by providing complete isolation and a repeatable RF environment, minimizing the need for time-consuming open-air testing. Moreover, this testbed environment demonstrates exceptional performance in terms of throughput by simulating an ideal MIMO environment.

The OB-PAL-5 is particularly well-suited for a range of test applications, including throughput of MIMO OTA, multi-user beamforming and MIMO, band steering, channel adaptation and data rate, fairness of airtime, quality of experience, roaming, capacity of router association, forwarding rate, multi-station throughput, and coexistence of Bluetooth, LTE, and Wi-Fi. The OB-PAL-5 can operate at a fixed modulation coding scheme to test receiver sensitivity and serve as a real-time analyzer, enabling users to observe the adaptation behavior of modern Wi-Fi systems. Detailed information such as RSSI, data rate, number of streams, channel width, and other physical layer metrics can be monitored and plotted.

Controlling the OB-PAL-5 is straightforward, as it offers a browser-based user interface and an open Applications Programming Interface (API). The API facilitates automation and easy sequencing of important performance tests, allowing users to conduct tests in ideal conditions or in the presence of controllable impairments. With the ability to emulate up to 32 virtual stations, each with its own IP traffic session, the instrument offers flexibility in testing scenarios. For throughput measurements, it supports various traffic endpoints, including octoScope’s multiPerf, iperf2, iperf3, IxChariot, and AT4. The key advantage of the OB-PAL-5 lies in its dual functionality as both a real device for real-life testing and a precise test instrument for radio testing and expert analysis.