  Direct photon detection is experimentally implemented to measure the
squeezing and purity of a single-mode squeezed vacuum state without an
interferometric homodyne detection. Following a recent theoretical proposal
[arXiv quant-ph/0311119], the setup only requires a tunable beamsplitter and a
single-photon detector to fully characterize the generated Gaussian states. The
experimental implementation of this procedure is discussed and compared with
other reference methods.
