A Novel Method for the Accurate Measurement of Soil Infiltration Line by Portable Vector Network Analyzer

Accurate measurement of soil infiltration lines is very important for agricultural irrigation systems. It can help monitor the irrigation of soil to control irrigation amounts and promote crop growth. The soil infiltration line is a complex dynamic boundary and is difficult to model accurately, leading to estimation deviation. A traditional TDR (time domain reflectometry) method is used in soil infiltration line measurement, but it lacks good applicability and accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a method—VFTT (The vector network analyzer’s frequency domain signals are converted to the time domain)—by the time domain to frequency domain conversion principle to improve the accuracy of soil infiltration line measurement. The experiment results show that the measurement method of soil infiltration line based on VFTT has high accuracy and robustness. After fitting the measured value with the actual one, R(2) reaching more than 0.98 can effectively measure the position of the soil infiltration line.