Agilent Technologies 8510-58 manual Assign classes, Standard labels, Standard Classes

Note

Mathematical operations on measurements (and displayed data) after calibration are not corrected for dispersion.

Enter WAVEGUIDE into the standard definition table for all four standards.

Standard labels

Labels are entered through the title menu and may contain up to 10 characters. Standard Labels are entered to facilitate menu driven calibration. Labels that describe and differentiate each stan- dard should be used. This is especially true for multiple standards of the same type.

When sexed connector standards are labeled, male

(M)or female (F), the designation refers to the test port connector sex—not the connector sex of the standard. Further, it is recommended that the label include information carried on the standard such as the serial number of the particular standard to avoid confusing multiple standards which are simi- lar in appearance.

The labels for the four standards in the waveguide example are; #1-PSHORT1, #2-PSHORT2, #3-PLOAD, and #4-THRU.

Assign classes

In the previous section, define standards, the characteristics of calibration standards were derived. Class assignment organizes these stan-

dards for computation of the various error models used in calibration. The Agilent 8510 requires a fixed number of standard classes to solve for the n terms used in the error models (n = 1, 3, or 12). That is, the number of calibration error terms required by the 8510 to characterize the measure- ment system (1-Port, 2-Port, etc.) equals the num- ber of classes utilized.

Standard Classes

A single Standard Class is a standard or group of (up to 7) standards that comprise a single calibra- tion step. The standards within a single class are assigned to locations A through G as listed on the Class Assignments table. It is important to note that a class must be defined over the entire fre- quency range that a calibration is made, even though several separate standards may be required to cover the full measurement frequency range. In the measurement calibration process, the order of standard measurement within a given class is not important unless significant frequency overlap exists among the standards used. When two stan- dards have overlapping frequency bands, the last standard to be measured will be used by the 8510. The order of standard measurement between dif- ferent classes is not restricted, although the 8510 requires that all standards that will be used within a given class are measured before proceeding to the next class. Standards are organized into speci- fied classes which are defined by a Standards Class Assignment table. See Table 2 for the class assignments table for the waveguide calibration kit.

17