So, turns out I had forgot one of the more important parts of a VNA's function, that it outputs Phasor values, that is vector-like quantities with defined phase and magnitude used to represent sinusoids.
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- The VNA is already providing information in a frequency sweep - every data point represents a sinusoid of a specific frequency.
- A sinusoid can be represented with three bits of information, its frequency, its magnitude and its phase offset.
- Therefore, given we already have frequency we can easily store the other two bits of information as a phasor and be quite happy!
- Phasors lend themselves quite well to multiplication/division operations - addition/subtraction is achievable after a simple conversion to rectangular (Cartesian) coordinates.
Of course to simply represent our two quantities as two different elements of a vector would be too nasty - we use imaginary numbers instead, in exponential form.
This realisation gives me the opportunity to work with way information than before. By taking phase into account when comparing two signals we can identify more properties to identify them, for instance phase differences, or absolute magnitude differences.
Clearly at this point I am sitting on top of a folder bursting with graphs (3D graphs!!), however they need a bit more work before anyone but me will understand them so I will save them for later...
This realisation gives me the opportunity to work with way information than before. By taking phase into account when comparing two signals we can identify more properties to identify them, for instance phase differences, or absolute magnitude differences.
Clearly at this point I am sitting on top of a folder bursting with graphs (3D graphs!!), however they need a bit more work before anyone but me will understand them so I will save them for later...
