Traceable RF Power Metering Procedures With Thermoelectric Sensors

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains the United States’ primary standards for traceable RF and mm-wave power measurements. In the 2.4 mm connector type, the specialized sensors that NIST currently uses as primary standards are not commercially available, which raises concerns about the long-term sustainability of NIST’s measurement capabilities. These concerns motivated us to explore the option of using commercially available thermoelectric power sensors. In this paper, we describe a power metering procedure and a preliminary uncertainty analysis for a power sensor that could be used for traceable RF power measurements. With our metering procedure we see good metered power linearity up to about 17 mW of RF power, weak temperature dependence, and an overall fractional measurement uncertainty of about 0.10 %(k=1).