Conical Near-Field Antenna Measurements
Author: Stuart F. Gregson, Greg E. Hindman
Publication: AMTA 2008
Copyright Owner: NSI-MI Technologies
A near-field measurement technique for the prediction of asymptotic far-field antenna patterns from data obtained from a modified cylindrical, or plane-polar, near-field measurement system is presented. This technique utilises a simple change in facility alignment to enable near-field data to be taken over the surface of a conceptual right cone [1, 2], or right conic frustum [3, 4] thereby allowing existing facilities to characterise wide-angle antenna performance in situations where hitherto they would perhaps have been limited by truncation.
This paper aims to introduce the measurement technique, describe the novel probe-corrected near-field to far-field transform algorithm which is based upon a cylindrical mode expansion of the measured fields before presenting preliminary results of both computational electromagnetic simulations and actual range measurements. As this paper recounts the progress of ongoing research, it concludes with a discussion of the remaining outstanding issues and presents an overview of the planned future work.