Effect of additive white Gaussian noise on accuracy of a six-port reflectometer

Effect of additive white Gaussian noise on accuracy performance of a six-port reflectometer (SPR) is presented in this paper. Three six-port circuits (sampling line, five-port ring and ideal design) calibrated with different calibration techniques (five and seven standard loads based) are investigated. Mathematical model of a SPR is developed and simulated. To evaluate the accuracy performance of a SPR at a certain signal-to-noise ratio, a mean absolute error is computed from mean distance between exact and predicted reflection coefficients for all possible passive loads. Validity of this work is proven with some experimental results at 1 GHz SPRs.