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Working with Touchstone Files

statpharmer

A Touchstone file is a standard file format used by vector network analyzers to store measurement results. I have a customer at one of our national laboratories who regularly needs to import Touchstone files for data visualization. It is a very cumbersome process currently as she first uses s-parameters in MATLAB to convert to a format that can be brought into JMP. It is very likely that we may have many in laboratory environments who could benefit from a better way to import .snP files directly. I am curious if there are others who have run into this question.

For more information on Touchstone files, the link below provides a great deal of information:

https://www.kirkbymicrowave.co.uk/Support/FAQ/What-is-a-Touchstone-file/

Accepted answers

stan_koprowski

Hi @statpharmer,

I collaborated with @brady_brady to create the Touchstone file importer, aka, sNp data.

Attached are some example files that I put together from the Touchstone spec and some other searches.

Not sure what is allowed for harvesting example data off the internet so internal use only.

cheers,

Stan

Example_sNp_sample_files.zip

All comments

DonMcCormack

I have not heard of this type of file, but from what I can tell, they are ASCII and the format is relatively straightforward. Would be a nice JSL project for someone. Do you have additional examples?

statpharmer

Unfortunately, the files my customer references are sensitive in nature and cannot be shared. I have asked if there is a generic example that can be found to share. I will post as I receive one.

Mark_Bailey

Do you mean to say that they are actually something like a CSV file but with a unique filename extension? So if a script iterated over the files, they could be imported directly afterward? Or the parsing would still require scripting?

DonMcCormack

I think you'd have to do some parsing of the file. The file parameters are at the link Rob gave.

stan_koprowski

Hi Rob,

I'll try and take a crack at it. I'll post a version here shortly.

Stan

stan_koprowski

Hi @statpharmer,

I collaborated with @brady_brady to create the Touchstone file importer, aka, sNp data.

Attached are some example files that I put together from the Touchstone spec and some other searches.

Not sure what is allowed for harvesting example data off the internet so internal use only.

cheers,

Stan

Example_sNp_sample_files.zip

statpharmer

Wow! Thanks to you and Brady for putting this together. I plan to create a virtual meeting with my customer to go through it and get feedback. I will let you know how it goes. Thanks so much!

statpharmer

Greetings Stan,

I believe that the great add-in you and Brady created may be useful for many of our customers in Federal labs. Thanks for posting in the community for public consumption and for your time. We plan to share the link with many in the coming week.

Rob

statpharmer

The add-in works great for our customer; however, they noted that instruments from Agilent Technologies save the files with upper case characters "*.S4P" in the suffix creating an error. It can be overcome by renaming the file prior to upload, which is a bit tedious if working with many files in a day. Is there an easy way to code in the flexibility to read in suffixes that have either lower or upper case suffixes?

stan_koprowski

Hi Rob,

Yes it is a simple change.

I'll post the updated add-in to the file exchange today.

Stan