<azonenberg>
they're making an e-cal for their VNAs
* azonenberg
can't wait to throw out these manual SOLT standards
<electronic_eel>
downside is that you'll have to by a new ecal when you upgrade to another vendor
<azonenberg>
I'd need to anyway
<azonenberg>
because the pico SOLTs are not that great compared to other vendors' standards
<azonenberg>
most other standards are super low return loss etc
<azonenberg>
Pico's approach is to use cheap, low quality standards but characterize the hell out of them
<azonenberg>
and correct for the errors in postprocessing
<azonenberg>
i.e. you're not calibrating with an ideal short you're calibrating with something that's kinda a short, but you know exactly how not-short it is
<azonenberg>
So they're limited to using their own standards that have cal data in their format
<electronic_eel>
hmm, interesting approach. i guess it is labor intensive to characterize each piece like this.
<azonenberg>
not really, just slap each one on a VNA
<azonenberg>
their .kit cal data file is literally a bunch of concatenated touchstone files for each standard