Ok, I think I understand this a little more now. The horizontal bar in the waveguide is a thermal mass, which heats up in the presence of RF. The detector thermistor is attached to it (too small to see here), and it will closely follow the temperature of the bar. A bias current runs through the thermistor, and also the isolated compensation thermistor. The comp thermistor has its own thermal mass, which is the gold plated square, and a couple of rectangular blocks, which I assume were selected and pasted in by hand during construction, and this can be finely adjusted via the screw. Not sure exactly where the compensation thermistor is yet, and the circuit diagram shows a capacitor here somewhere. Could be both are in the white block, which looks like a modern SMD cap.