Toward a Simple Return Loss Bridge.

Wes Hayward, w7zoi, 27Feb2012, update 4March12

Abstract: The fundamental ideas used in the return loss bridge are reviewed. A simple design is then presented that covers the MF, HF, and VHF spectrum. This discussion supplements that of section 7.7 of EMRFD.

Some Basics
An extremely handy tool for the home RF Lab is the return loss bridge, or RLB. This instrument, usually intended for use in a 50 Ohm system, allows one to evaluate the quality of an impedance match. It is usually built as an accessory that is used with other equipment. The RLB usually operates at small signal levels, so it is possible to examine the input or output of small signal amplifiers, filters, or even receivers. The same instrument can be used for antenna impedance evaluation. Some basic schematic diagrams are shown in Fig 1.

Fig. 1. Schematic diagrams that show the basic ideas and some variations of the Return Loss Bridge.

The concept for the return loss bridge evolves from Fig 1A, a traditional Wheatstone Bridge. A battery is shown as the source, but the circuit can be used with an AC source and detector. This classic circuit uses an uncalibrated detector that serves as a null indicator. An unknown resistance is attached to the circuit and the calibrated variable resistance is adjusted until no signal is seen in the detector. The two resistors on the left side of this circuit, Fig 1A, are equal, so the unknown is equal to the calibrated resistance when there is a null response at the detector. It is not necessary that equal resistors be used on the left side of the bridge. There are a seemingly unlimited number of bridge types. selections in Reference Data For Radio Engineers. It's interesting to peruse the

Figure 1B shows a radio frequency return loss bridge. The dominant departure from the classic Wheatstone Bridge of Fig 1A is in the addition of transformer T. T is an isolation transformer, also known as a common mode choke. The reader is urged to read the classic paper by G. Guanella, "New Method of Impedance Matching in Radio Frequency Circuits," Brown Boveri Review, September 1944, p327. This paper is widely available on the web. The transformer connects the instrument at the Detector port, usually one with a 50 Ohm impedance, directly to the floating port at the other end of the transformer. T isolates the floating port from ground, yet allows a differential signal to appear at the detector. The detector impedance appears at the floating port. The signal path is by way of the "differential mode" of the transformer while isolation is achieved from the common mode. The simplest versions of a RLB merely place a bifilar winding on a ferrite toroid. The common mode inductance can be measured by temporarily soldering the dotted ends of T to each other and the un-dotted ends to each other to form a simple inductor with the usual single winding replaced by two parallel wires. The inductance is then the common mode value. The common mode inductance should be high enough to have a reactance of 5 times (or more) the bridge impedance (50 Ohms in these examples) at the lowest operating frequency for the circuit. At the same time, the capacitance and resistance across the inductor should both be small enough that they do not present a low impedance common mode path between the floating detector port and ground. The real subtlety of the circuit, and the genius of the Guanella work, is that T acts as a transmission line with regard to the differential mode. Transformer modes are illustrated in Fig 2.

Fig. 2. Transformer Modes Another difference between the classic Wheatstone circuit, Fig 1A, and the RF bridge of

Fig 1B is in the role of the detector. The Wheatstone detector is just a null indicator. However, a return loss bridge facilitates a measurement by using the information of that appears at the detector port. Consider a normal measurement. An RF source is attached to the RF-In port and the Unknown-Load port is open circuited. The response at Det, the detector port, is noted. An unknown is then attached and the response at Det is again noted. The ratio of the two, or the difference if logarithmic units such as dBm are being used, is the return loss, usually in dB. The characteristics of the instrument at Det. is a vital part of the overall measurement. The RLB of Fig 1B differs from the Wheatstone in by using an external reference impedance. It is attached to the circuit in place of a simple internal resistor. This means that the reference contains all of the stray impedance elements that might appear with the unknown, including transmission lines. This external impedance is an option and is not required for all bridges. Figure 1 shows two useful RLB refinements. Transformer T of Fig 1B has one winding connected to ground at the Det port while the other end attaches to the detector impedance, typically 50 Ohms. This asymmetry is partially fixed by adding inductor L, shown in Fig 1C. Both the reference and the unknown ports now see an inductor to ground. The added inductor is ideally an exact copy of transformer T, but wired as a common mode element, as shown in Fig 2. The quality of the transformer T was mentioned. Parasitic C and R come into play at high frequency to compromise the high common mode impedance of a single transformer. Fig 1D shows a topology where two Guanella transformers are cascaded. T1 of Fig 1D might be compromised with coupling around it at the high end of the instrument frequency range. If T2 is constructed to have good performance at the high end, it may well correct the lower frequency difficulties. The modifications shown in Fig 1C and 1D are common to many commercially built instruments, such as those found with some HP network analyzers.

Fig 3, The "String of Pearls Bridge."

A bridge variation shown in Fig 3 is sometimes called the SOP or "String of Pearls," so named because it resembles such jewelry. (This name was applied to the structure by a colleague, either W7PUA, or G4TXG.) Recall that T in Fig 1B formed a transmission line to connect the detector to the floating port within the bridge. Hence, the transmission line characteristic impedance is important. If it differs from the detector impedance, a transformed, frequency dependent impedance will appear at the floating port. The transformer in the SOP is fabricated with a piece of coaxial cable that is loaded with ferrite beads. These might be toroids if the coax is large, but are more often ferrite beads that have an inside diameter that will accommodate the coax cable. The transformer structure is duplicated and connected to emulate the inductor of Fig 1C. It is best to use ferrite that fits tightly against the coax to effectively choke the flow of current on the outside of the coax. A large enough collection of beads is added to have suitable low frequency inductance. Most implementations of the SOP RLB use a mixture of ferrite types, creating a transmission line version of Fig 1D. Ferrite loaded coax cable structures have been around for a long time. For example see C.G.Scntheimer, US Patent 3,492,569, "Bridge Circuit Network for Measurement of Reflection Coefficient." An excellent paper within the amateur literature is Michael Martin, "Wideband Directional Coupler for VSWR Measurements in Receive Systems," VHF Communications, Issue 3, 1983, pp153-162. Measurements There are two frequency dependent parameters that characterize the bridges that we built. The first is called directivity which is a measure of the bridge response when the "unknown load" is a perfect 50 Ohms. To measure directivity, a generator is attached and set to the frequency of interest. The unknown port is open circuited and the power at the detector port is noted. The "perfect" load is then attached and the new power is noted. It will be (we hope) much lower than the calibration response from an open. The ratio of the two powers is the directivity. A good goal for directivity is 30 dB or more. Directivity is a measure of how well the bridge does in measuring impedances close to 50 Ohms. The second parameter of interest is the Open-Short ratio. This is a comparison between the response with an open circuit and a short circuit applied to the unknown port. Both cases represent very high reflection or high VSWR. A good bridge will have OS values of less than 1 dB. This is a measure of the bridge response to very poorly matched impedances, "on the edge of the unit circle."

Fig 4. Open, Short, and Load elements used for bridge evaluation. Most of the bridges in our experiments used SMA connectors. This connector is convenient for easily built evaluation fixtures. An ideal "open" was obtained by grinding the center pin down with a Dremel tool as shown in Fig 4, left. The short was built with a small piece of metal with a center hole that was placed over the connector, followed by soldering everything to everything else. The "perfect" 50 Ohm load consists of four 200 Ohm, 0.1 % 0805 SMT resistors soldered to a modified SMA header. Calibration with a set of references of this sort is referred to as OSL Calibration. The difference between a clean "open" (left element of Fig 4.) and merely leaving the unknown port connected to nothing was no more than a 0.1 dB up to our measurement limit of 500 MHz. But a small phase variation is easily detected when VNA measurements are done. The elements of Fig 4 were originally built to calibrate a bridge used with an N2PK vector network analyzer. See N2PK.com. A wide variety of measurement tools were used as the RF source and as the detector. More often than not, a simple signal generator was used, followed by enough of a 50 Ohm pad to provide a clean source impedance. The usual detector was just an Analog Devices AD8307 based power meter. It is important to keep the RF level at the power meter below -10 dBm when operating above 400 MHz, for we discovered errors with higher levels. In some cases we used a spectrum analyzer as the detector. In other cases the VNA was used as both the RF source and the detector. The VNA is the ideal instrument, but the N2PK design only operates to 60 MHz. Once a bridge has been evaluated, it can be used for measurements. The measurement procedure starts with an open circuit applied to the "unknown" port. The detector response is noted. The unknown impedance is then attached and the detector response is again noted. The ratio of the power levels is called the return loss. If the powers are measured in dBm, the difference is the return loss in dB, a positive value for passive loads. Reflection coefficient (often signified by Gamma), return loss, and voltage standing wave ration (VSWR) are all related. See http://w7zoi.net/retloss.pdf.

Experiments and Some Results

This report is not intended to be an exhaustive study. While all of the bridge circuits mentioned above have been built, only limited data will be summarized here. The goal

is to present a design that will do a reasonable job from the bottom of the MF spectrum through the top of VHF. The device goals are D>30 dB and |OS|<1 dB. In all of the bridges built, the resistors attached to the RF source were always SMT types, usually 1206. Some of the circuit boards will be seen in later photos. An external reference on a coax connector was used for all of the bridges built. The bridges presented in EMRFD often used a FT37-43 core. This was a poor choice. The core is something of a standard, and there is good reason for this: it works well for many of our applications. The -43 material is popular for wide band low impedance transformers and for EMI suppression. But it is a lossy material and this loss will compromise the performance as a bridge transformer. The -43 initial permeability is about 850, low enough to make it difficult to obtain good low frequency performance. Remember that this bridge is an application where the impedance is often much different than 50 Ohms. We found that the Amidon "J" material with an initial permeability of 5000 offered better bridge performance. The J material is similar to -75 material. All transformers are wound with #32 enameled wire, twisted to about 7 full turns per inch. The windings are evenly spaced on the toroids to minimize turn to turn capacitance. Initial measurements showed this to be reasonable close to a 50 Ohm transmission line, although optimization is definitely in order. The more common #28 wire was tried, but did not work as well owing to added turn-to-turn capacitance with 10 turns.

Fig 5.

A comparison of three designs.

Figure 5 above shows measurements from 0.1 to 500 MHz for three simple bridges. The black and red curves use the circuit of Fig 1B, the classic RLB. The black curves show directivity and Open/Short results for a bridge using a single toroid as the transformer where T consists of 11 bifilar turns of #32 wire on a FT37-61 core. This is a material with high Q, but very low initial permeability of 125. The common mode inductance is only about 5 uH, so it is not surprising that directivity is poor at low frequency. However, this very simple bridge provides good directivity up to 500 MHz. The blue traces show the performance with 10 bifilar turns, also #32, on a FT37-J core. The high frequency performance is not as good as the -61 core, but the performance is good from 0.5 to over 100 MHz. The red curves of Fig 5 illustrate a cascade of the two transformers described and measured individually. There is a significant improvement in both VHF directivity and O/S with the cascaded cores. Two of the bridges described by the red curves are shown below in Fig 6. Most of our work used the SMT versions, for we had the best reference elements for OSL measurements. However, some have been built with BNC connectors.

Fig 6. Photos show bridges with SMA and BNC connectors. The schematic is that of Fig 1D. The boards were designed to accommodate SMA connector on the board edge, but where then modified with a nibbling tool or file when walls were placed around the structures. There was minimal performance difference between BNC and SMA bridges. The toroids are only supported by the windings. Other builders may want to cut a rectangular hole in the board that would accommodate the toroids. Some Silicone caulking might then hold the core in place. Holes in the board with very small cable ties through the toroid and the holes might also do well. The ground plane was removed under the toroids in some cases, but with no observed results. The next experiment addressed the effectiveness of adding the inductor of Fig 1C. Two bridges were evaluated. The first used 10 bifilar turns of #32 wire on a FT37-J core. Data for this bridge is shown in the red curves. Then an inductor, again 10 turns on a FT37-J core, was added. A DVM was used to determine which side of the bridge was grounded, revealing where the inductor should be added. The data is shown in Fig 7 below with a photo in Fig 8. The extra inductance clearly helps the low frequency directivity.

Fig 7. Effect of adding an inductor to the simple bridge. See figures 1B and 1C. These measurements used a VNA sweep that stopped at 50 MHz. It is not clear if the fine structure at 50 MHz in the OS response is real or the result of a measurement anomaly.

Fig 8.

Photo and schematic for the simple bridge with an added inductor.

A simple bridge suitable for duplication is described in the next measurement. It is built with the schematic and photo shown in Fig 8 above. Only 7 bifilar turns is used on each of the FT37-J cores. It was reasoned that some low frequency performance could be sacrificed for improve high frequency performance. The results are shown below in Fig 9. These measurements used two manually tuned signal generators and an AD8307 based power meter with digital readout. The power meter has a reading of -75 dBm with no applied signal, the result of wideband circuit noise. This compromised the directivity readings. The actual directivity may be better than shown.

Fig 9. Directivity and Open/Short performance for the simple bridge of Fig 8, which features an added inductor. The design goal mentioned earlier was met except at 300 MHz where directivity was only 28 dB.

The reference impedance for the bridge of Fig 8 is a coaxial element essentially identical to the one that we use for directivity measurements. Indeed, most of the bridges we have built emphasized this symmetry. This is probably not required at HF/VHF and a 49.9 Ohm SMT resistor could be substituted, making the construction simpler and reducing cost. Experiments are definitely in order.

Conclusions and Other Experiments.

The simple bridge with a transformer on a J core with an added inductor is an easy bridge to built, yet one that should satisfy the needs of most experimenters. But there are many other bridges that can be considered. One obvious one is to add external inductance to the bridges of Fig 6. This experiment was done and the low frequency directivity immediately became excellent. However, the behavior between 300 and 500 MHz was compromised. Further work is required. An experiment that needs to done is to evaluate a simple bridge with a single transformer on a -61 core with a matching -61 shunt inductor. Cores somewhat larger than the 0.37 inch OD size might be in order, for they would allow slightly more common mode inductance than achieved with a FT37-61 core shown in the black curves of Fig 5. Bridges using the String-of-Pearls structure need to be investigated in more detail. One colleague (W7PUA) built one with excellent wide band performance, although he used a HP VNA to adjust it. Several SOP bridges have appeared on the web in recent times. Three url are suggested. http://www.ve2azx.net/technical/RLBridges.pdf http://www.yagicad.com/Projects/RLBConv.htm http://www.yagicad.com/Projects/ARRLB.htm And how could we forget the wonderful work of Scotty who has built several bridges. See http://scottyspectrumanalyzer.com/ This RLB project has encompassed several years of sporadic experimentation and numerous email discussions. I sincerely appreciate the interactions with N7FKI, W7PUA, G4TXG, and WA7TZY.