Design of a broadband multiprobe reflectometer

A new design approach for low-cost multiprobe reflectometers is presented. While traditional circuits adopt equally spaced probes, the solution presented here provides a method to greatly enhance the bandwidth of the measuring system by a proper choice of each probe position. As an example, a five-probe (1–16) GHz reflectometer was designed and the measurement results compared to those obtained with commercial vector network analyzers.