Experimental estimation of mismatch uncertainty in radio - frequency power and attenuation measurements

In this paper, the effects of the input quantity representations in linear and complex forms are analyzed to estimate mismatch uncertainty separately for one-port and two-port components. The mismatch uncertainties in power and attenuation measurements are evaluated for direct, ratio and substitution techniques with the use of a vector network analyzer system in the range of 1 to 18 GHz. The estimated mismatch uncertainties were compared for the same device under test and these values have verified that their evaluation is dependent on the representations of input quantities. In power measurements, the mismatch uncertainty is reduced when evaluating from the voltage standing wave ratio or reflection coefficient magnitudes in comparison to the complex reflection coefficients. The mismatch uncertainty in the attenuation measurements, are found higher and linearly increasing while estimating from the linear magnitude values than those from the S -parameters of the attenuator. Thus in practice, the mismatch uncertainty is estimated more accurately using the quantities measured in the same representations as of measuring quantity.