Practical considerations in selecting software or hardware gating for RCS measurement systems

As in any real world measurement application, there are performance trade offs to be made between hardware and software gating in RCS measurements. Hardware gating adds significant complexity and cost to the measurement system and, incorrectly applied, can result in degraded measurement performance. A measurement system based on software gating is the simplest and most cost effective to implement but may have performance limitations on some types of ranges. The objective of the paper is to provide useful guidelines to use in choosing between an HP 8510B RCS measurement system (network analyser) based on software gating, hardware gating, or a combination of the two approaches