As any regular reader of Evaluation Engineering’s monthly print or digital issue knows, we feature two ‘Special Reports’ in every issue on a specific topic relevant to electronic test & measurement. One report discusses an instrumentation topic, while the other discusses an applications topic. Both reports take deep dives into the technology trends, challenges, customer demands, and new solutions in that topic. We’ve received great feedback on these reports throughout 2019, and it’s always great to hear that readers find them very informative.
As the biggest features in nearly each issue of the year, those Special Reports each typically encompass three-to-five pages of an EE issue. But in this October issue, each report is super-sized—crossing seven pages each. Again, this is irregular, but the anomaly is due to the topic of each report. October’s instrumentation report focuses on portable instruments, while the applications report covers automotive test. Each of these topics are broad, and resulted in EE receiving the most vendor commentary submissions that we’ve received in my time here as Editor-in-Chief. The portable instruments report includes insights from 10 different vendors, while the automotive test report includes more than a dozen.
Even with allotting extra page space to include as much vendor commentary as we could, it was still a major challenge to make things fit. Naturally, all commentary couldn’t be included in print, and to make up for that, the website versions of each report on www.evaluationengineering.com are expanded.
It’s great to see so much interest and vendor involvement in our Special Reports. We’d always rather have too much commentary than too little. Certainly, the report topics help dictate how much interest there will be, and broad topics such as October’s usually lead to a big turnout. Even so, the volume of commentary we received for them was stunning.
Furthermore on the topic of automotive test, EE readers have a great opportunity to see everything our Special Report covers and more at Automotive Testing Expo, held Oct. 22-24 at the Suburban Collection Showplace in Novi, MI, a short drive from Detroit. The show features more than 400 exhibitors from the automotive test and design space, as well as a slew of educational sessions each day, covering essentially anything you could think of in automotive component testing, validation technology, autonomous driving, and much more. Learn more about Automotive Testing Expo on page 34 of this issue. EE’s October print issue will be distributed at the show, so be sure to pick up a copy.
Coinciding with that show, this October issue goes heavy on automotive test coverage with two contributed articles—one covering the evolution of vibration fixturing (pg. 23), and the other covering thermal management (pg. 26).
