db is confusing, when you're talking voltage it's 20log(Vs/Vw) And in absolute terms engineers talk about the power over 1mW.

Myself I get miffed a bit because people have been conditioned to think in terms of trying to pull facts out of crappy data sets using poorly thought out statistics. However in a lot of engineering and physics fields the data is often really good. Often good enough that you can work off a single measurement.