A Monte Carlo analysis of VNA-based time domain uncertainties

While VNA-based time domain measurements have been in use for decades, an uncertainty analysis has often been limited to the concept of an `average¿ of frequency domain uncertainties. There is some evidence that this is too restrictive a view and that there is a need for a better framework to understand the dependencies. A physical model-based Monte Carlo analysis concept will be presented here that illustrates the wide disparity in how certain frequency-domain uncertainty concepts propagate to the time domain. Among these findings is that some classical match and directivity components are often suppressed while certain drift components can be accentuated.