Electronic – What are the advantages of CPW over microstrip

Forget category c: some things are truly disposable and can't be reused in their current state unless you want to start a recycling company.

Category B is the most interesting. For tools, there's eBay: just resell stuff you don't need. Even then, a lot of what we do is specialty stuff: I have 6805J programmers that no one wants even for the cost of shipping. They've simply outlasted their usefulness.

The problem with reusing hardware is the documentation has to be perfect, or the time spent trying to reuse a board or other hardware becomes more costly than simply starting from scratch again. I find that for the things I build for other people, I'm pretty good at keeping good documents. But for stuff I build intending to use for few days and then forget about, documentation is pretty much none existent, so boards end up permanently consigned to the junk bin.

The issue I see if you're trying to create a matched termination, is that except for the one at upper-right, your terminations are all short circuits, not matched terminations.

Since your frequency band is exactly one octave, it's possible that you could design the length of the CPW from your probe pads to the short-circuit to be approximately 1/8 wavelength, so that the short will appear as a match when seen from your probe point. This will work well for a narrow band around, say, 1.414 GHz, and will be a very bad approximation at the edges of your band at 1 and 2 GHz. If you have space, you could make different test structures with different lengths for testing in different portions of your band.

If you can work out how to do it, the option at upper-right would create a matched termination over a much broader band, but as you say it would require very careful design to ensure it's really a broadband 50 Ohm termination. From a geometry p.o.v., I'd suggest using a symmetric structure with 100 Ohm resistance from the central trace to the ground on each side.

An option that might be even better is to build a "through" structure instead of a stub structure. Put probe pads at both ends of your transmission line, and use two probes. Then let the VNA and its 2-port calibration math work out the errors due to the slight mismatch of the probe at the far end, instead of relying on your assumed-perfect 50-Ohm load as a reference for determining the trace impedance.