Three separate explosive firing areas are active year-round and are supported by permanent full-time staff. The site is available for use on commercial, foreign government, and US government contracts.

The Remote test site is heavily supported by SRI's staff and facilities in Menlo Park. Physicists, engineers, and technicians from Poulter Laboratory and other divisions of SRI regularly travel from Menlo Park to the remote test site to collaborate with and guide the permanent test site staff in achieving the goals of the experiments. Often the test articles and test fixtures used at the remote test site are fabricated and instrumented in the laboratories and shops in Menlo Park. Specialty gages such as flatpack stress gages, mutual-inductance particle velocity gages, bar gages, and shock-isolated accelerometers are fabricated in Menlo Park. Additional equipment used at the remote test site include flash x-ray units, framing cameras, high-speed video, and laser velocimeters.

The nature and purpose of experiments performed at the remote test site span a very broad range. Weapons effects, hazards and safety, and basic science are typical areas of study. Sometimes a test is conceived, designed, and conducted in a matter of hours to obtain urgent information for a customer or to evaluate a plan for a larger, more expensive experiment. Other tests involve several participants from a team of agencies and contractors with many channels of instrumentation and expensive test articles built at SRI or elsewhere. The most common type of test is the so-called "precision test," aimed at providing well-defined conditions and reliable data for computer-code validation.