An RF or other high frequency transceiver including a loopback reference channel for measurement of an absolute power level. A transmit channel in the transceiver includes a programmable power amplifier that can be controlled to operate at a selected power level, and a receive channel including a receive amplifier, mixers, filters, and analog-to-digital converters. The loopback reference channel includes a self-biased amplifier, followed by a series of buffers that generate a square wave from the received signal, and an attenuator applying an attenuation gain to the square wave. The transmit power at a programmed power level can be calculated from ratios of a measured power level of a transmitted signal as received by the receive channel to the measured power level of the transmitted signal using the loopback reference channel.