Broadband characterization of microstrip launcher structures through a single measurement

A single-measurement technique is presented to allow the effective and robust characterization of the complete two-port S-parameters of a microstrip launcher structure. The measured reflection S-parameter, S₁₁,_, of the launcher when connected to an arbitrary open-ended microstrip line is represented as an impulse response by a novel non-uniform discrete-time technique. Using standard transmission line theory, the impulse response is then split into several spans in the time-domain, each of which may be transformed separately into the frequency-domain and used to create a determined system of non-linear equations for each measurement frequency. In this way the full two-port S-parameters of the launcher structure are recovered. The analysis and verification procedures show that this method is effective and straightforward to apply.