Development of a Symmetric Ring Junction as a Four-Port Reflectometer for Complex Reflection Coefficient Measurements

Abstract

Six-port reflectometer is well-known for its ability to measure magnitude and phase-shift of microwave signal using four power detectors that perform magnitude-only measurements. This paper presents the development of an innovative symmetric ring junction as four-port reflectometer for complex reflection coefficient measurements. It reduces the number of required detectors to two. Design optimization, new calibration modeling and algorithm are discussed in details for this four-port reflectometer. The developed four-port reflectometer is compared to five-port reflectometer and vector network analyzer. It is found that the measured magnitude and phase-shift shows good performance in comparison with the commercial vector network analyzer and the five-port reflectometer.

Keywords

• Six-port reflectometer
• complex reflection coefficient
• four-port reflectometer
• network analysis
• nonlinear multi-objective optimization