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The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has measured a WR-8, 3D printed horn at 112.25, 118.75, and 125.25 GHz using the near-field spherical scanning method. The data were processed with both the NIST standard software and the probe-position compensation software. We conclude that the positioning capability of the NIST Configurable Robotic Millimeter-wave Antenna System is so accurate that probe-position compensation is negligible at these frequencies.
An experimental case of spherical probe-corrected phaseless near-field measurements with the two-scans technique is presented, based on magnitude measurements at two surfaces of the VAST12 reflector antenna performed at the DTU-ESA Facility. Phase retrieval using strictly the directly measured near-field magnitude was unfeasible in this setup, due to the small sphere separation allowed by the probe positioner, which led to incorrect and excessively slow convergence. Phase retrieval with larger separation between spheres has shown remarkable results. For these tests a measured magnitude was used in combination with calculated near-field magnitudes at different (larger and smaller) spheres with larger separations than allowed by the experimental setup. It has been seen that larger separation between measurement spheres improves accuracy of phase retrieval. A measurement with a backprojected measurement with 3 m sphere separation is of particular interest because it can be potentially replicated in the DTU-ESA Facility assuming such range of movement was allowed, while being accurate down to an error of less than-35dB. Measurements with larger spheres show even better accuracy. These good results were obtained with the normal spatial sampling rate for complex measurements and with a very simple Hertzian dipole initial guess, and show the superior performance of spherical phaseless measurements with the two-scans technique, compared to a planar setup.
Altair Engineering Inc. Troy, MI USA-https://www.altairhyperworks.com Figure 1. The electromagnetic, aerodynamic, and structural performance of a nose cone radome can be characterized by computational simulation, allowing for early design concept validation and reducing the dependence on physical testing. Abstract-Radomes protect antennas from structural damage due to wind, precipitation, and bird strikes. In aerospace applications, radomes often double as a nose cone and thus have a significant impact on the aerodynamics of the aircraft. While radomes should be designed not to affect the performance of the underlying antennas, they also must satisfy structural and aerodynamic requirements. In this paper, we demonstrate a multiphysics approach to analysis of airborne radomes not only for electromagnetic (EM) performance, but also for structural, aerodynamic, and bird strike performances, as depicted in figure 1. We consider a radome constructed using composite fiberglass plies and a foam core, and coated with an anti-static coating, paint, and primer. A slotted waveguide array is designed at X-band to represent a weather radar antenna. The transmission loss of the radome walls is analyzed using a planar Green's function approach. An asymptotic technique, Ray-Launching Geometric Optics (RL-GO), is used to accurately simulate the nose cone radome and compute transmission loss, boresight error, and sidelobe performance. In addition to EM analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analysis is used to predict pressures resulting from high air speeds, which are then mapped to an implicit structural solution to assess structural integrity using the Finite Element Method (FEM). We also demonstrate damage prediction due to a "bird strike" impact using an explicit structural FEM solver. The multiphysics simulation techniques demonstrated in this paper will allow for early design validation and reduce the number of measurement iterations required before a radome is certified for installation.
Measurement scenarios for 5G mobile communications are nowadays challenging the industry to define suitable turn-key solutions that allow Over the Air (OTA) testing of non-connectorized devices. In order to respond to the needs of an effective measurement solution, that allow measuring all the required OTA parameters at both sub6GHz and mm-Wave frequencies and that could be deployed in a very short time, the Compact Antenna Test Range (CATR) was chosen. In this paper, we will summarize the performance and the testing capabilities of a short focal-length, corner-fed CATR design, providing a 1.5 m x 1.5 m cylindrical Quiet Zone, operating from 1.7 GHz to 40 GHz and upgradeable to 110 GHz, allowing OTA measurements of Active Antenna System (AAS) Base Stations (BS), installed at Ericsson premises in Gothenburg, Sweden in 2017.
In this contribution the signal received by an antenna is understood as an inner product built by the polarization vectors of the involved antennas. By using a suitable unitary transformation the polarization efficiency can be straightforwardly calculated without additional assumptions. By solving an eigenvalue problem given by a unitary operator which represents a rotation, a simple and illustrative interpretation is possible. The formulation is applied to derive the well-known relations of the improved three antenna polarization measurement technique given by Allen C. Newell, which is mainly based on the measurement of relative power levels. Some measurement results and the calculation of the achievable measurement accuracy are presented.
Radar data on the complete polarimetric responses from a 4" dihedral corner reflector from 4 to 18 GHz have been collected and studied. As a function of the azimuth, the vertically suspended object may present itself to the radar as a dihedral, a flat plate, an edge, a wedge, or combinations of these. A two-dimensional method-of-moment (2-D MOM) code is used to model the perfectly electrical conducting (PEC) body, which allows us to closely simulate the radar responses and to provide insight for the data interpretation. Of particular interest are the frequency and angular dependences of the responses which yield information about the downrange separation of the dominant scattering centers, as well as their respective odd-or even-bounce nature. Use of the corner reflector as a calibration target is discussed.
Specular reflectance data of indoor interior materials is a prerequisite to analysis of the channel characteristics for new millimeter and submillimeter indoor wireless communications. Antenna property such as gain and radiation pattern is one of the key measurement quantities in electromagnetic wave metrology. This paper describes a specular reflectance and antenna property measurement system and shows measurement results of the specular reflectance of an Acetal plate and the antenna property of a 24 dB horn antenna in 325-500 GHz frequency range.
In order to support near-field measurements of automobile antennas in as realistic as possible environments, an equivalent sources based near-field far-field transformation approach for near-field measurements above a possibly lossy dielectric half-space is presented and evaluated. Different possibilities for considering the half-space influence are discussed, where an approach with an appropriate half-space Green's function is found to be most accurate, as expected. The formulation of the equivalent sources transformation approach with the half-space Green's function and a formulation with free-space Green's function together with equivalent sources representation of the half-space influence are discussed and a variety of results are presented in order to corroborate the feasibility of the various approaches.
This paper presents a way to determine mutual coupling effects through analysis of the active voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) to predict the presence of large reverse power levels in co-located multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radars in transmit mode. The methodology consists of measuring the forward and reverse waves on a dual directional coupler (DDC) to directly obtain the active reflection coefficient on a co-located MIMO radar system. The active VSWR of each individual antenna is computed from measurements of the active reflection coefficient. These results are compared against analytical methodologies.
The use of mode filtering to improve the quality of antenna measurements taken in non-anechoic environments is well known, [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. In the far-field case [6, 7, 8], it has been shown that it is possible to use standard cylindrical near-field theory [8] to implement the necessary mode filtering using a singularly polarized, great circle, far-field pattern cut consisting of amplitude and phase data. The careful verification of this technique using a compact antenna test range (CATR) was reported in [7, 8] however that implementation had, as a prerequisite, the need to acquire the far-field data on a monotonic and equally spaced pattern abscissa. In many instances this is not convenient or perhaps impossible. This paper presents a recent development which allows data to be processed rigorously when having been acquired using an unequally spaced angular abscissa. This paper sets out the novel, far more sophisticated, algorithm together with results of actual range measurements that were processed using this new technique.
The Translated Spherical Wave Expansion (TSWE) has recently been proposed as a very effective Near-Field-to-Far-Field (NF/FF) transformation tool for down-sampled Spherical Near Field (SNF) measurements with offset Antenna Under Test (AUT). In case of electrically small probes and/or small AUT-probe view angles the TSWE can be accurately applied without compensating for the probe effect. Instead, when electrically larger probes and/or larger view angles are considered, the measured signal is affected by an averaging field effect that should be properly compensated to ensure a good accuracy. In this paper the TSWE technique is applied for the first time tacking into account the full effect of the measuring probe. To validate the proposed technique, a standard gain horn intentionally displaced in offset configuration have been measured in SNF geometry with a first order probe and two different wideband higher-order antennas as probe.
The Plane Wave Generator (PWG) is an array of elements with suitably optimized complex coefficients, generating a plane wave in the close proximity of the array. Thus, the PWG achieve far-field testing conditions in a Quiet Zone (QZ) at a reduced distance in a manner similar to what is achieved in a Compact Antenna Test Range (CATR) [1]. In this paper, the concept of a high performance, dual polarized PWG supporting up to 10:1 bandwidth is presented for the first time. A prototype of a dual polarized PWG has been designed, manufactured and tested in the 600MHz to 6GHz frequency range. The initial testing results on QZ uniformity and evaluation of possible measurement accuracy are presented.
The unknown-thru calibration technique is being used to achieve a system level calibration at millimeter wave frequencies (>50 GHz) on the robotic ranges at NIST. This two-port calibration requires the use of a full bi-directional measurement, instead of a traditional single-direction antenna measurement. We explored the value of the additional data acquired. We find that we can use this information to verify antenna/scan alignment, image the scattering from the positioner/facility, and perform a first order correction to the transmission data for uncertainties due to LO cable flexure.
Finding an off the shelf antenna tuned for the operating frequency of a small satellite mission can be difficult, especially when the mission uses an experimental license in a frequency band that is not used for commercial or amateur radio systems. This paper discusses how electromagnetic modeling software can be used to assist adapting commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) antennas to other operating frequencies than the ones for which they have been originally designed. The discussion is illustrated with a case study outlining how a COTS cross-polarized UHF Yagi amateur radio antenna is adapted for operation in the 400 MHz experimental bands.
We present a preliminary study of a modal (partial wave) expansion of the field used to characterize a propagation channel. We assume that the measurements of the scalar, two-dimensional field from which the modal expansion coefficients are obtained, contain Gaussian phase noise with zero mean. Three spatial sampling patterns of the field are considered. We find that the accuracy of the reconstructed field is strongly influenced by the spatial sampling pattern.
This paper investigates the use of a reverberation chamber for antenna radiation pattern measurements allowing for significant cost reduction compared to anechoic environments. Our method utilizes averaging of paddle measurements to replicate anechoic data. We discuss both a correlation experiment, to determine how many degrees the reverberation paddle must rotate to create an uncorrelated measurement based on a 0.5 correlation threshold, and a radiation pattern measurement. Two matched horn antennas are used and operated between 1 GHz and 18 GHz. Good agreement is found between our measurements taken in a reverberation chamber and those taken by the manufacturer of the antenna in an anechoic chamber. We find that the main lobe radiation pattern of our antenna can be estimated with more certainty than the back-lobe radiation using a reverberation chamber. The goal is to use this simple and cost-effective method to determine radiation patterns for embedded antennas with unknown patterns, such as those within wireless devices.
We use a simple program to compute fields radiated by a collection of elementary electromagnetic dipoles located at arbitrary points within the measurement sphere. The simulated measurement data have been used to provide a direct and convincing demonstration of the accuracy and robustness of both the standard and position compensated NIST SNF code.
The growth of connected mobile devices in the current network and new applications such as real-time communication, video streaming and others, exponentially increases the throughput demand. The proposed paper presents a numerical and experimental study of propagation and coverage on a 91 m² indoor environment at 24.15 GHz. The numerical analysis has been made with the support of Altair WinProp™ software in order to estimate the environment coverage map. The numerical study is experimentally validated by collecting error vector magnitude (EVM) measurements, in specific positions, of a 160 Mbit/s QAM signal. The transmission is made by a 12-dBi gain omnidirectional slotted waveguide antenna array with approximately 1 GHz of operational bandwidth. Experimental results presented a 40% coverage for EVM below 12%.
The Conex Antenna, Radar, and Measurement Equipment Lab (CARAMEL) is a ten-element VHF antenna array that operates from 30 MHz-120 MHz with an attached lab space. This array was developed for use in low frequency Radar Cross Section (RCS) measurements. The antenna elements support both vertical and horizontal polarizations. The antenna was designed using a genetic algorithm, employing the fragmented aperture technique; measured and modeled data will be presented. The attached lab space is air conditioned and provisioned for rack mounted equipment. The structure uses a modified 20' Conex shipping container where an entire sidewall has been replaced with a reinforced composite radome for the antennas. The overall mechanical frame design included a Finite Element Analysis to ensure structural integrity. The system is intended for long-term standalone use as an outdoor measurement radar system but can be moved using standard shipping container methods. The structure was shipped using a standard cargo carrier from Atlanta, Georgia to White Sands, New Mexico.
In this paper, the concept of a new S-band dual-polarized dielectric rod antenna is discussed. The antenna is composed of two concentric dielectric cylinders. The inner dielectric presents high dielectric constant, while the outer has a lower dielectric constant. Given this configuration, the resulting antenna provides high gain, narrow beamwidth, large bandwidth, and very low cross-polarization. In addition, the antenna is lower size in the transversal dimensions, and is predicted to be lighter than other antennas that provide equivalent performance, especially at low frequencies (S-band). An antenna with such an architecture can be 3D-printed, and therefore, the cost for the fabrication are considerable low. Numerical results of the antenna performance are presented and discussed.