Cost-Effective Single-Port Measurement Campaign for Test System Calibration

A radio frequency (RF) test system is typically calibrated by a two-port network analyzer in conventional setups. However, the conventional calibration scheme becomes problematic for 5G base station (BS) test system as example due to setup complexity, cost and potential mismatch problems. A cost-effective single-port measurement scheme is presented in this paper. Based on the existing test system, the presented measurement scheme directly utilizes a single-port unit to calibrate the BS test system by three steps, i.e. unit self-calibration, switching matrix measurement and post-processing. The presented single-port measurement scheme is experimentally demonstrated to achieve the equivalent functionality as the conventional network analyzer scheme, reduce the measurement cost, while addressing the measurement inaccuracy introduced by the potential mismatching issue.