Field engineers dilemma

Communication issues in field can be either due to a basic channel physics i.e. inadvertant channel conditions or due to protocol and its respective implementation. A field-engineer would traditionally pack different analysis equipment so they can collect relevant data on both channel and protocol front for post processing. These various equipments would imply connecting a laptop through cable (usually USB-Serial), starting their respective applications and triggering data collection

In addition to diversity of specialized equipment to carry, other non channel related aspects further impact both spectrum and protocol analysis excercise for the PLC case

• Underground substations, specially in urban areas may have limited physical space for reasonable placement of laptop with connecting cables to analysis device resulting in some very uneasy experiences

• Outdoor analysis on a rainy day is virtually impossible

Some contemporary anlyzers have started to offer mobile device support addressing some of these practical issues but there are further details which still stay the "Achilles' heel" of a field engineer.

Spectrum analyzer perspective

Spectrum analyzers are usually generic devices, made to measure and display the level of energy on the channel. The generic nature of these equipment requires specific procedures to be applied when using them PLC

• Owing to basic measurement of energy on channel, any ongoing PLC communication occuring at the time of measurement will need be manually filtered out. This is cumbersome for locations that have a PLC rollout with several active devices

• Powerline characteristics change as users plug-in and plug-out their appliances on grid resulting various artefacts that impact communication (e.g. impedance, noise). A benign channel at 2 pm in afternoon may look very noisy at 7 pm in evening when most people arrive home from work and a diverse set of electrical equipments get functional. A spectrum analyzer only only takes an instant snapshot while the field engineer is at the location and therefore misses time-of-day related channel characteristics changes

Protocol analyzer perspective

Various chip vendors offer different functionalities in their protocol sniffer devices but these are basic sniffers which once again require additional custom software to post-process data and do not provide a real-time perspective required by a field engineer. Protocol analyzers have become functionally feature rich with front-ends like Wireshark but when it comes to channel analysis, they don not offer anything beyond basic information on received signal strength

Next gen analyzers, doing both channel and protocol analysis

The practical design and state-of-art features of nBox-Tool, coupled with excellent usage experience prompted our customers to ask for spectrum analysis functions in the device. This would not only reduce the inventory of analysis equipments to carry to field but also result in convenience of measurement coming from its mobile device support