A High Sensitivity Microwave Sampling System with Adaptive Time-Drift Compensation

A new microwave sampling system is presented whose sensitivity has been increased by digital processing of the measurement data. The signal processing gets more complicated due to a time drift caused by electronic circuits in the sampling oscilloscope. An adaptive method to compensate for this time drift has been developed. The influence of noise is discussed, giving the remaining time uncertainty as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio. Finally an example illustrates how this method can be applied in an automatic sampling system.