Design and Preliminary Indoor Assessment of a Long-Range Sub-THz VNA-Based Channel Sounder between 500 GHz and 750 GHz

Practical, traceable sub-Terahertz (sub-THz) propagation channel characterization in real-world environments presents new measurement challenges as current systems utilizing coaxial cable setups suffer from high cable losses that restrict the range of the measurements when assessing meaningful real-world use cases and application scenarios. This paper presents, for the first time, a novel dynamic range adjustable design of a long-range sub-THz vector network analyzer (VNA)-based channel sounder system operating between 500 GHz and 750 GHz using both power adjustable radio-over-fiber (RoF) technologies and a phase compensation mechanism. The link budget with up to 600 m of optical fiber and preliminary indoor radio channel sounding assessments have been carried out to evaluate the functionality of the proposed system at distances of up to 4.49 m.