Fault Detection of Electrical Connectors in RF Circuits Using a Wavelet Transform Approach

Communication connectors are often exposed to atmospheric environments and could easily be subjected to contaminants. The existence of faulty connectors will alter the signal that is being transmitted and lead to faults as well as bit errors in communication systems. In the present work, fault detection of connectors in radio frequency circuit systems was studied and analyzed using a wavelet transform approach. Experiments were conducted to observe the signal changes introduced by contaminated connectors. Because real signals are often mixed with some noise, a wavelet de-noising method is also applied. Both experimental and simulation results show that the occurrence of faults could be determined by the wavelet transform method. By analyzing changes of the frequency and amplitude, the locations of faulty connectors could also be determined in circuit systems.