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2 - Instrumentation for wireless systems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Nuno Borges Carvalho  and
Dominique Schreurs
Nuno Borges Carvalho
Affiliation:
Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
Dominique Schreurs
Affiliation:
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
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Summary

Introduction

In the first chapter the main figures of merit for microwave and wireless circuits and systems were presented. Those figures of merit are fundamental for a correct specification of the system to be built, and thus their identification and measurement are key to the success of the wireless engineer.

In order to perform correct measurements of those figures of merit, a set of instruments should be used. These instruments should be jointly capable of identifying the most important parameters of the system and clearly, and without any ambiguity, capturing the correct values to be measured.

Several types of instrumentation were developed for gathering all these values and thus clearly identifying the quantities to be measured and specified. In this chapter we present a description of how these instruments work, and their main drawbacks will be explained. For each instrument the quantities to be measured, the internal architecture, the definition of the main instrument parameters, and its calibration procedure will be covered. This is done for the main and most important instruments available to microwave and wireless engineers, namely

  1. (1) power meters

  2. (2) spectrum analyzers

  3. (3) vector signal analyzers

  4. (4) real-time signal analyzers

  5. (5) vector network analyzers

  6. (6) nonlinear vector network analyzers

  7. (7) oscilloscopes

  8. (8) logic analyzers

  9. (9) noise-figure meters

Type
Chapter
Information
Microwave and Wireless Measurement Techniques , pp. 63 - 132
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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References

[1] European Union, Council Directive 89/617/EEC of 27 November 1989 amending Directive 80/181/EEC on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to units of measurement.
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[18] D., Humphreys, M., Harper, J., Miall, and D., Schreurs, “Characterization and behavior of comb phase-standards,” in European Microwave Conference (EuMC), Oct. 2011, pp. 926–929.Google Scholar
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