Context:

Transmission lines are structures constructed of uniform material arranged as an array of conductor or semiconductor pairs to guide electromagnetic waves carrying radio frequency energy between a transmitting device and a receiving device. Its importance in communications lies in the knowledge of its fundamental parameters, which requires specialised measurement equipment and laboratory instruments to make important decisions on the coupling of technologies in data transmission systems.

Methodology:

To do so, a hardware and software architecture is created and implemented using analogue inputs to measure attenuation and digital and timed interruptions to measure the delay between the incident and transmitted waves, whose data are used to calculate characteristic impedance, attenuation constant, phase constant, propagation speed, resistance, conductance, capacitance and inductance, by means of experimental equations. Four experiments are carried out using 305 meters of coaxial cable, checking the data obtained with the manufacturer's theoretical data and validating with measurements of specialised specialized electronic instrumentation equipment, such as the function generator and the digital oscilloscope, with the aim of finding out the error of the proposed tool designed compared to advanced instruments.

Results:

As a result, a device is built that calculates the basic parameters of a transmission line with an error between 3 % and 9 % in the measurements.

Conclusions:

The developed tool delivers results close to the theoretical values and when compared with electronic measurement instruments (digital oscilloscope and function generator), it measures the characteristic impedance accurately; it presents a percentage error of 3.7 % when measuring the phase constant; and finally, it presents a percentage error of less than 9 % when measuring the attenuation constant, delay, propagation speed, resistance, conductance, capacitance and inductance. This determines that the maximum error of the measurements is 8.98 %, demonstrating that the proposed device developed is suitable for measuring the parameters of transmission lines.

Financing:

University of Pamplona.