TABLE OF CONTENTS Internationally agreed standard methods of measurement allow us to share good practice and ensure the compatibility of measurements that are made in different laboratories. These methods are of particular importance when specifying a procedure for the determination of properties of a material for a well-defined end-use. That said, however, methods outlined in such standards often lag behind the state-of-the-art in metrology. This is inevitable because test houses and product-control laboratories cannot be expected to be as up-to-date or as well equipped as calibration laboratories or those that have the task of developing new measurement methods for new types of material. Standard methods can be read as a guide to the art of measurement and they clearly must be followed, where possible, in many commercially oriented measurements. But there are many areas of dielectric metrology where effective written standards do not exist or else where significant practical detail is lacking from them. In these circumstances one often has to fall back on the scientific literature for a more detailed account of the methods. Dielectric standards may be found in the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) catalogs and in the International Elec-trotechnical Commission (IEC) and Comite Europ en de Normalisation (CEN) systems. British Standards (BS) are nowadays subsumed into the IEC and CEN ranges. Note that CEN electrical standards are normally referred to as 'CENELEC standards. A short overview of RF and MW dielectric standards is given in Reference...
