A novel noise figure and gain test set for microwave devices

A new instrument for the measurement of noise and gain of microwave devices is presented. It differs for the commercial ones in the execution of the gain measurement and it is also useful for measuring mismatched devices such as transistors. The instrument is driven via HP-IB by a PC, a user-friendly virtual panel is designed to perform all the required operation including the possibility of correcting kind of errors (second-stage contribution, ENR variations, temperature variation, etc.). The good performances of the instrument are compared with commercial instrumentation.