I was wondering what the best method of "bench testing" was. I would really like to do an accurate bench test of Nstreme2 using a pair of RB532 boards and 4 MT Atheros 5212 cards. What is the best method for simulating antennas in an office environment? Attaching pitails only? Antennas attached with power turned all the way down on the cards?

Any advice would be welcomed I want a real world result from my bench testing. I will post the results once I have them.

Thanks,
Ken

The only way you can really get "real world" test results, is to test in the real world.... Unless the environment that you are trying to simulate were to contain absolutely no RF noise, you would never be able to reproduce the conditions of a true real-world environment. If you did want to test in a no-noise environment, you could use lengths of cable and RF attenuators to add "free-space" loss. You should really test your radios with them running at about the power levels that you expect to run them at out in the field, as different radios can behave different ways at different power levels. Otherwise, when I bench test radios between each other, I just use a low gain patch antenna on each end, and point them away from each other. I then set another 3rd radio on the side, broadcasting in Super-G or Turbo-A mode to add a little noise. I am not an expert on wireless bench testing, so others may have better methods...

Hitek