We have a DUT with 4 waveguide ports on it and have to do a series of calibrations on each port. Right now we are running through each calibration on each port, one at a time. What this results in is performing the same steps of each calibration about 32 times per test set (8 calibrations over 4 ports). I found a very similar question asked by Osmobel, however in his case they were re-doing the calibrations for different frequency sweeps. In the response, @Daras mentioned that it is possible to cascade mixer calibrations (what we are doing) into one step. I can't seem to find any documentation on how to accomplish this programmatically, so any help on how to set this up would be greatly appreciated.
When you do the individual Mixer calibrations now, do you use the "Split Cal" option? If you don't use split cal and are running a recent version of firmware (BTW, it is always helpful to include the model number and firmware version of your VNA when asking questions here), there is a calibration option called "Calibrate All". with Cal All, you can select all the channels you want to calibrate and the wizard will automatically consolidate all the common steps and frequencies and create a single set of calibration steps that removes duplicate standards. But Cal All does not yet support the "Split Cal" option in the mixer calibration (sometimes needed with Waveguide setups), in which case, you can still start multiple simultaneous guided calibrations, but this is strictly a remote programming solution. You didn't mention if you were performing the cals from the front panel or doing them programmatically. If you are doing them programmatically, are you using the SCPI or the COM interface? I can dig up some examples for either scenario.