Avian’s Blog

Previously I was writing about some experiments with reflection measurements using an rtl-sdr receiver. I used the rtl-sdr as a simple power meter together with an RF bridge to measure VSWR. This was a scalar measurement. All the phase information from the signal was lost and with it also the angle information about the complex impedance of the load I was measuring. Since I was happy with how the method performed in that experiment I was wondering if I could adapt the setup to measure the phase information as well.

With a vector measurement I need a reference signal to compare the phase of the measured signal to. This is a problem, since the rtl-sdr only has one input and can only sample a single signal at a time. My idea was that perhaps I could multiplex the reference and the measured signal onto the single input. Both time and frequency multiplex seemed doable, but time multiplex seemed by far simpler to implement in hardware. Integrated microwave switches with usable characteristics, such as Renesas F2976, are reasonably cheap these days.

Previously I recorded a 2 second array of digital samples of the measured signal for each scalar measurement point. With the time multiplex setup, I could record similar 2 seconds of input, but that input would now contain both the reference and the measured signal. I could then de-multiplex and process it in software. The new setup would look something like the following. The device under test could again be a bridge, or something else:

The time multiplex board contains two SPDT switches. In one position, the switches direct the reference signal to the rtl-sdr. In the other position the signal passes through the device under test and then back to the rtl-sdr. The switch frequency I'm thinking about is somewhere around 100 Hz. A complex baseband signal recorded by the rtl-sdr would then look something like this:

Most of the complexity in this setup would be in software. The software would need to find out which parts of the recording is the reference and which part is the measured signal. This is similar to clock recovery in a receiver. It would then compare the two signals and do some filtering. This is a rough block diagram of the processing pipeline:

The reality is a bit more complicated though. Especially clock recovery seems tricky. My original intention was to use auto-correlation of the signal but it turned out much too slow. Right now I'm just using simple amplitude thresholding, which works as long as DUT is attenuating the signal enough compared to the reference. There's also some additional processing required to account for the fact that my delay is an integer number of samples, which introduces an additional random phase shift that needs to be accounted for.

So far I've only performed some proof-of-concept simulations of this setup using the performance of the rtl-sdr I've seen in my scalar measurements and the properties of the switches from the datasheet. It does seem feasible. Here are simulated vector measurements of three points on the complex plane. For example, these might be complex reflection coefficient measurements on the Smith chart. The gray dots show the true value and the blue dots show the simulated measurements:

There is some angle and amplitude error, but otherwise the principle seems to work fine. These are the histograms of the errors over a large number of simulated measurements of random points on the complex plane, where the measured signal was well above the receiver noise floor:

I'm not sure yet what part contributes the most to these errors. I'm simulating several hardware imperfections, such as switch cross-talk, frequency and phase inaccuracies and receiver noise. The most complicated part here is the clock recovery and I suspect that has the largest effect on the accuracy of the output. The problems with clock recovery actually made me think that having a four-state "off-dut-off-ref" cycle instead of a two-state "dut-ref" for the switches would be better since that would gave a much stronger pattern to match against. Another idea would be to lock the multiplex clock to the actual signal. ERASynth Micro does provide a 10 MHz reference clock out, but dividing it down to 100 Hz would need a huge divider.

Anyway, the simulations so far seem encouraging and I probably can't get much further on paper. I'm sure other factors I haven't thought of will become evident in practice. I plan to make the time multiplexing board in the future and try to do some actual experiments with such a setup.

Another short note related to the RF bridge I was writing about previously. The PCB has four resistors soldered on. Two pairs of 100 Ω in parallel. Each pair forms one of the two fixed impedances in the two branches of the bridge circuit. The two variable impedances in the bridge are the device under test (left) and the termination on the REF terminal (right). The black component on the bottom is the RF transformer of the balun circuit.

My father pointed out the fact that these resistors don't look particularly high precision. The "101" marking (10 times 10¹ ohms) is typical of 5% tolerance resistors. 1% parts more often have "1001" or the EIA-96 character code. Unfortunately I can't simply measure them in circuit with a multimeter, because the balun forms a DC short circuit across them. I don't want to desolder them. Still, I was wondering how much variances in these resistors would affect the bridge directivity.

Following is the result of a Monte Carlo simulation showing three histograms for bridge directivity. Each was calculated for one possible tolerance class of the 4 resistors used. The assumption was that individual resistor values are uniformly distributed between their maximum tolerances. The effect of two parallel resistors on the final distribution was included. The peak on each histogram shows the value for directivity that is most likely for a bridge constructed out of such resistors.

Each tolerance class defines the lowest possible directivity (where the two resistors are most mismatched). On the high end the histogram isn't limited. In any tolerance class there exist some small possibility that the resistors end up being perfectly matched, however the more you move away from the average directivity the less likely that is, as the probability asymptotically approaches zero.

This is the same data shown as an estimate of the cumulative distribution function. The annotations on the graphs show the 90% point. For example, for 5% resistors, 90% of the bridges would have higher than 32.1 dB directivity. You gain approximately 20 dB in directivity each time you reduce the resistor tolerance by a factor of 10.

It's important to note that this was calculated using a low-frequency bridge model. In other words, none of the high-frequency effects that cause the real-life directivity to fall as you go towards higher frequencies are counted. Any effects of the balun circuit and the quality of the REF termination were ignored as well. So the directivity numbers here should be taken as the best possible low-frequency case.

Anyway, I thought this was interesting. Similar results apply to other devices that use a resistor bridge circuit as a directional coupler, such as the NanoVNA and its various variants. Also somewhat related and worth pointing out is this video by W0QE where he talks about resistor matching for calibration loads and how different SMT resistors behave at high frequencies.

The "Transverters Store" RF bridge, for a lack of a better name, is a low-cost bridge circuit that can be used to measure reflection loss or voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) at radio frequencies. It claims to be usable from 0.1 MHz to 3 GHz. Basic design and operating principle of a similar device is described in "A Simple Wideband Return Loss Bridge Revisited", an article by Paul McMahon from 2005. In it he also gives measurements of its performance up to 500 MHz. The exact device I have seems to be very much related to Paul McMahon's design. It came from a web page called Transverters-Store and shipped from Ukraine. Very similar looking products with more or less exact copies of the PCB layout are available from various other sources. Since there's no product number or a clear name associated with it, most often people refer to these as simply "that cheap bridge from eBay".

In short, the bridge operates similarly to the typical resistor bridge networks, like the Wheatstone bridge. The network is composed of two 50 Ω resistors on the PCB itself (each made out of two parallel 100 Ω resistors), the reference load on the REF port and the device under test on the DUT port. The biggest difference is the addition of a balun circuit. This makes the detector output referenced to ground, instead of floating between the two bridge branches like in a low-frequency bridge. The balun is implemented here as a high-frequency transformer made out of a row of black ferrite beads and two lengths of coax.

The bridge can in principle be thought of as a directional coupler. The signal power on the OUT port only corresponds to the reflected power coming back in to the DUT port, but (ideally) not the forward power going out of that port to the device under test. Compared to a true directional coupler however the bridge can't be operated in the reverse. You can't measure forward power by connecting a signal source on the OUT port and a detector on the IN port.

This is how the bridge would behave if everything was ideal. The vertical axis shows the power on the OUT port relative to the power on the IN port. The horizontal axis shows return loss of the device under test. Using directional coupler terminology, the bridge has a coupling factor of 16 dB if used with a 50 Ω detector. It's also interesting to see that if using such a detector on the OUT port, the output of the bridge is slightly non-linear in respect to return loss. The difference is small - an open circuit will measure around 1.5 dB too high and a short will measure around 1.5 dB too low. Considering other inaccuracies, this detail probably isn't significant in practice.

Below you can see the setup I used for the experiments. Signal source on the top left is an ERASynth Micro. The detector on top right is an Ezcap DVB-T dongle (using Elonics E4000 tuner) and rtl-power-fftw. Both the source and the detector are controlled from a PC through a USB connection. Above the bridge you can see the terminations I used in the experiments: A borrowed professional Narda Micro-Pad 30 dB attenuator (DC - 18 GHz) which I used as a terminator, a couple of home-made 50 Ω SMA terminators (using two parallel 100 Ω 0603 resistors in a SMA connector), a home-made short and a no-name terminator that has a through-hole metal-film 51 Ω resistor inside.

Using this setup I tried to measure the directivity of the bridge. Directivity is the measure of how well the bridge selects between the forward and reflected power. The higher directivity, the lower return loss and VSWR you can reliably measure with it. Anritsu has a good application note that describes how directivity affects measurement error. I measured directivity by measuring OUT port power twice: once with a short on the DUT port and once with my home-made terminator. Dividing these two values gave an estimate of bridge directivity. I performed two measurements: once with the Narda attenuator on the REF port and once with my home-made terminator using two 0603 SMT resistors.

There is an approximately 200 MHz wide gap in my measurements at around 1.1 GHz because the DVB-T receiver cannot tune on those frequencies.

You can see that my two measurements differ somewhat. In both, the bridge shows good directivity up to around 1 GHz. Above that, it's below 20 dB which introduces a large error in measured VSWR as you'll see below. The DVB-T receiver I used also shows a decrease in sensitivity above 1 GHz, however I've repeated this measurement using different input power levels (from -10 dBm to -30 dBm on ERASynth micro) and they all show similar results, hence I believe the measured decrease in directivity is not due to the limited dynamic range of my measurement setup.

In general, I think the biggest source of errors during these experiments are the terminators I've used. The directivity measurement assumes that the bridge can be measured with perfect termination on both the DUT and REF ports. By testing various combinations of terminators I had at hand I've seen significant differences in output port power, which suggest they are all slightly imperfect in different ways.

This is how my measurements compare with the measurements published on the Transverters Store website. The blue and orange plots are same results as above, only rescaled. Red plot is the Transverters' result. Again, my results differ from theirs. Below 500 MHz mine show a bit better directivity. Above 500 MHz mine are worse. Both show a slow decrease and then a sharp fall at around 1 GHz. I'm not claiming their measurements are wrong. My setup is very much improvised and can't compare to professional equipment. It's also very likely that different devices differ due to manufacturing tolerances.

Finally, here's an example of a VSWR measurement using this setup. I've measured the bad attenuator I've mentioned in my previous blog post that's made using a standard through-hole resistor. Again, the blue and orange plots show measurements using the two different references on the REF port of the bridge. The shaded areas show the error interval of the VSWR measurement due to bridge directivity I measured earlier. The VSWR of the device under test can be anywhere inside the area.

Interestingly, the terminator itself doesn't seem that bad based on this measurement. Both of my measurements show that the upper bound of the VSWR is below 1.5 up to 1 GHz. Of course, it all depends on the application whether that is good enough. You can also see that above 1 GHz the error intervals increase dramatically due to low bridge directivity. The lower bounds do carry some information (e.g. the terminator can't have VSWR below 1.5 at 2 GHz), but the results aren't really useful for anything else that a rough qualitative estimate.

In the end, this seems to be useful method of measuring return loss and VSWR below 1 GHz. Using it at higher frequencies however doesn't look too promising. 3 GHz upper limit seems to me like a stretch at this point. The largest practical problem is finding a good 50 Ω load to use on the REF port, a problem which was also identified by others (see for example a comment by James Eagleson below his video here). Such precision loads are expensive to buy and seem hard to build at home.

I was also surprised how well using the DVB-T tuner as a power meter turned out in this case. I was first planning to use a real power meter with this setup, but the device I ordered seemingly got lost in the mail. I didn't see any indication that the dynamic range of the tuner was limiting the the accuracy of the measurement. Since all measurements here use only ratios of power, absolute calibration of the detector isn't necessary. With the rtl-sdr device you only need to make sure the automatic gain control is turned off.