Further Procedures for Laboratory Testing of Environmental Sensing Capability Sensor Devices

NTIA Technical Memorandum TM-18-527 describes procedures for testing the functionality of Environmental Sensing Capability (ESC) sensors that will detect 3.5 GHz radar signals for future spectrum sharing systems. The present document describes additional ESC certification test tasking. The first addition involves (a) examination of ESC behavior in the presence of high-power radar pulses; (b) examination of ESC behavior in the presence of out-of-band radar pulses that coincide in time and frequency with in-band 3.5 GHz radar pulses; and (c) examination of radio frequency (RF) front end filtering characteristics of ESCs. These three observations, which were already included in pre-certification testing, will now be repeated in certification testing so that their results can be included in each ESC’s final certification test report. The second addition is the use of non-linear frequency modulation (NLFM) chirping in lieu of linear chirping for a subset of pulses in Radar Waveform Bins 3 through 5. NLFM chirping has been added to make some of the pulses in those bins more closely resemble pulses that are expected to be used by some future 3.5 GHz radars. The third addition is observation of ESC behavior in the presence of high background noise levels in ESC detection channels.