A staged gasification process coupled with a gas engine is one of the most promising technologies for small and medium sized electricity production. The purpose of this work was to design and build new experimental equipment to characterise the wood char gasification stage in fixed bed/staged reactors. The Continuous Fixed Bed reactor (CFiB) at CIRAD replicates the gasification zone separately from the rest of the process. Instrumentation is a key point of the equipment. Sampling and measuring probes are positioned all along the char bed, every 10 cm, enabling online analysis of temperature, pressure and gas composition, along with condensate tracking. Accurate heat and mass balances were carried out to validate reactor performance and the methodology. Lastly, to illustrate the high potential of this research, equipment profiles for temperatures and gas concentrations along the bed are presented and discussed.