2027 Agenda

Every assurance layer in a mission-critical system inherits whatever the RF layer handed it. A transcription confidence score, a mean opinion score, a quality-of-experience report: each sits on top of a physical path through an antenna, a feedline, connectors, and a combiner, and none of them can tell you when that path degraded.

Most sites are swept at commissioning and then, if the budget holds, once a year. In between, the failures that matter are the quiet ones. Passive intermodulation raises no alarm. It lowers receive sensitivity; it comes and goes with temperature and weather, and on a coverage map it looks exactly like a coverage problem, which is how it gets misdiagnosed as one and solved with a site nobody needed.

This session works down the chain from the ear to the antenna, using measurements rather than argument: what a forward and reflected power reading actually tells you and what it does not, why VSWR is a blunt instrument for a fault that is intermittent by nature, and where the loss you are chasing usually turns out to be.

Fifty years of building antennas, combiners, and sensors for these systems produces a particular view of the problem: the most sophisticated thing you can do to a radio network is measure the least sophisticated part of it properly.

Attendees leave able to tell an RF problem from a network problem before spending money on the wrong one.