Design and Preliminary Indoor Assessment of a Long-Range Sub-THz VNA-Based Channel Sounder between 500 GHz and 750 GHz

Abstract

Practical, traceable sub-Terahertz (sub-THz) propagation channel characterization in real-world environments presents new measurement challenges as current systems utilizing coaxial cable setups suffer from high cable losses that restrict the range of the measurements when assessing meaningful real-world use cases and application scenarios. This paper presents, for the first time, a novel dynamic range adjustable design of a long-range sub-THz vector network analyzer (VNA)-based channel sounder system operating between 500 GHz and 750 GHz using both power adjustable radio-over-fiber (RoF) technologies and a phase compensation mechanism. The link budget with up to 600 m of optical fiber and preliminary indoor radio channel sounding assessments have been carried out to evaluate the functionality of the proposed system at distances of up to 4.49 m.

Lawrence Carslake

Communications Research Scientist

My research interests include communications experimental testbed design and RF simulation.