Acoustic ultrasonic measurements are widespread and commonly use transducers exhibiting
resonant behaviour due to the piezoelectric nature of their active elements, being designed
to give maximum sensitivity in the bandwidth of interest. We present a characterisation of
such transducers that provides both magnitude and phase information describing the way in
which the receiver responds to a surface displacement over its frequency range. Consequently,
these devices work efficiently and linearly over only a very narrow band of their overall
frequency range. In turn, this causes phase and magnitude distortion of linear signals. To
correct for this distortion, we introduce a software technique, which considers only the input
and the final output signals of the whole systemwhich is therefore generally applicable to any
acoustic system. By correcting for the distortion of the magnitude and phase responses, we
have ensured the signal seen at the receiver replicates the desired signal. We demonstrate a
bandwidth extension on the received signal from 60-130 kHz at -6dB to 40-200 kHz at -1dB
in a test system. The linear chirp signal we used to demonstrate this method showed the
received signal to be almost identical to the desired linear chirp. Such systemcharacterisation
will improve ultrasonic techniques when investigating material properties by maximising the
accuracy of magnitude and phase estimations
