Two full 2-port calibrations must be performed and those calibrations (plus front panel setups) must be stored to the current directory on a USB memory device or hard disk. The setups for the two calibrations should be the same in terms of frequency range and number of points. Upon entering the adapter removal utility, an estimate for the electrical length of the adapter must be entered, as well as the location of the two calibrations. Once this is done, the utility will generate and apply a new calibration by removing the adapter effects. The menu and help screen for this procedure are shown in Figure: MANUAL ADAPTER REMOVAL Dialog Box—2-Port VNAs.

The following example should help illustrate the use of the adapter removal utility. An adapter was constructed with about 3 dB of loss and 180 degrees of phase shift at 3 GHz. This leads to an estimate of the delay length of:

Since the loss of this adapter is substantial, one could not simply use reference plane extensions to remove the phase shift and hope for an accurate result.

The two calibrations described earlier were performed and stored to the hard disk and the adapter removal was executed. A thru was then connected without the adapter in place. Normally this would not be possible (since the whole reason for using the adapter removal was for situations when a thru would be difficult), but this example an adapter was constructed just to show that the algorithm functions correctly. The results are shown in below (Figure: VNA Trace Display with Result of Adapter Removal).

The thru without the adapter was connected after executing the adapter removal utility and the near-perfect thru values for S21 show that the algorithm successfully removed the adapter from the calibration. As expected, the thru without the adapter shows nearly zero insertion loss and phase shift, and a very good match. Any residuals are largely due to cable flex. Had this connection been made with one of the initial two calibrations applied, S21 would have shown about 3 dB of gain since the adapter had been built into each calibration.