Conception of a Dual-band Six-port Based Reflectometer

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a dual-band six-port based reflectometer designed and implemented using a six-port junction and a four-channel diode detector to measure the reflection coefficient of an unknown load. The proposed reflectometer has been implemented to operate at two frequencies of 1.5 GHz and 2.7 GHz. A linear calibration procedure using five standards has been used to identify the calibration matrix that characterizes the six-port reflectometer. This matrix is used then during measurement to compensate for the reflectometer imperfections and identify the reflection coefficient of the load under test. The experimental results showed that the proposed dual-band reflectometer provides a good accuracy in terms of measurement accuracy compared to the commercial N5230A PNA-L high performance Agilent Network Analyzer with a much lower implementation cost.