A Portable Data Acquisition/Statistical Analysis System for Measuring Vehicle RFI Characteristics

A new microcomputer-based statistical measurement system can accurately acquire vehicular ignition generated RFI impulse noise data and quickly reduce it to tabular and plotted outputs of the distributions of amplitudes and of periods between occurrences of a particular amplitude. This user-interactive system obtains distributions generated by all cylinders or, by synchronous electronic gating using a fractional-cylinder window, obtains distributions generated by any portion of any isolated cylinder. It permits quick and effective testing of proposed designs and design changes during the development process. This paper presents system description, system proveout and system application results.