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I'm currently working on a project where I'm trying to figure out if there exists a significant difference between measurement instruments for RF power measurements. I will measure multiple Bluetooth modules TX-power with 4 different instruments.

Now, let's say I measure one module on all 4 instruments. The spread of the TX-power measurements is 0.15dBm. The measurement uncertainties of the 4 instruments are 0.1dB, 0.2dB, 0.3dB, and 0.5dB.

Is there any way to combine the uncertainties of all the instruments? In other words, have one uncertainty value that represents all instruments. For example, if the combined uncertainty would be 0.2dB, the spread of 0.15dBm would be within instrument uncertainty.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Part of the instrument uncertainty is its port match, which has a different weighting depending on the port match of the source. You would need to know a lot about the instruments to do anything meaningful by combining them. The safest thing to do is to treat each uncertainty as the max and min possible of a range for each measurement, then pick as your result the range that is the AND of of those ranges. \$\endgroup\$
    – Neil_UK
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 8:18
  • \$\begingroup\$ So basically choose the smallest range? \$\endgroup\$
    – user294957
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 12:47
  • \$\begingroup\$ @user294957 yeah, you have a really good measurement device, so just use that. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 16:16

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Well, this is basic statistics. Your uncertainty \$\sigma\$ is probably the standard deviation of instrument if it's unbiased (i.e. if, on average, it estimates correctly), or more generally, the RMS error of the \$i\$th devices from the correct value \$X_0\$:

$$\sigma=\sqrt{\mathbb E\left\{(X_i-X_0)^2\right\}}$$

However, definitely verify this is the definition of "uncertainty" your individual device use! "Uncertainty" is not as strict a term as it should be.

Now, it all depends on how you independent these errors are. Simplest case, the measurement errors are uncorrelated, and all devices are unbiased estimators (so, \$X_0=\mathbb E\{X_i\},\,\forall i\$); then, taking the average of measuments

\begin{align} \sigma^2_\text{average}&= \operatorname*{Var}\left(\frac 1N \left(\sum_{i=1}^N X_i\right)\right)\\ &= \frac1{N^2}\operatorname*{Var}\left(\sum_{i=1}^N X_i\right) &&\| \tag1\text{factor: quadratic influence on variance}\\ &= \frac1{N^2}\sum_{i=1}^N \operatorname*{Var}\left(X_i\right) &&\| \tag2\label{indep}\text{independence: variance of sum == sum of var}\\ \sigma_\text{average} &= \sqrt{\sigma^2_\text{average}}\tag3\\ &=\frac1N\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^N \operatorname*{Var}\left(X_i\right)}\tag4\\ &=\frac1N\sqrt{\sum_{i=1}^N \sigma_i^2}\tag5,\\ \end{align} in other words, if, and pretty much only if,

  1. all devices on expectation estimate the true value (that's usually not exactly the case! Usually, measurement devices are designed to have the least variance \$\sigma_i^2\$, not be bias-free, as these are conflicting optimization goals),
  2. the error is independent for different devices (which is highly unlikely – if one device underestimates the power, it's probably because some aspect of the signal doesn't perfectly fit its design, and then it likely also is underestimated by a different device),
  3. and you average your measurements,

then you can press down the estimation variance by a factor of the square of how many devices you have. (That's actually, without having much more involved a model, the best you'll be able to do).

If any of the errors are correlated, eq. \$\eqref{indep}\$ doesn't hold, and instead, you get an additional covariance term there – but to estimate covariance between your measurement devices, you'd need multiple relevant measurement standards that you observe with your measurement devices, and that ends up being real workTM.

So, honestly, use your 0.1 dB device. For sanity's sake, this is a bluetooth module! It operates in an indoor environment with unknown moisture, quite probably with moving absorbers ("humans") and reflectors (metal things). 1 dB uncertainty is nothing here; you could probably not make an experiment reproducible enough for that to be a relevant difference in a real-world transmission scenario. So, to answer your original first question:

I'm trying to figure out if there exists a significant difference between measurement instruments

unless you're a certified lab doing measurements where you're legally required to have a lower uncertainty than 0.5 dB, none of this is significant in the application and you can just pick one measurement device do your measurement.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ This makes sense. Are there any sources I could refer to? \$\endgroup\$
    – user294957
    Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 12:45
  • \$\begingroup\$ For the statistics aspect: hm, that was subject of a first semester lecture (but they moved that to third semester right after), which didn't come with a textbook, so I'm a bit short on a reference. The "rules" for working with variances are enough "common knowledge" that anyone saying "I'll need a reference for that" can just do the math themselves; the proofs literally fit in four lines (I held the exercises to that lecture later on). \$\endgroup\$ Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 13:29
  • \$\begingroup\$ For the variability of the typical indoor channel: go and make your own measurement, where you put yourself in the room and sit at two different places to show that outside of anechoic chambers, channel repeatability that makes better measurement necessary is not given. \$\endgroup\$ Commented Aug 8, 2022 at 13:31

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