Measured Response of Local, Mid-range and Far-range Discontinuities of Large Metal Groundplanes using Time Domain Techniques

This work describes a method to detect and to quantify any local or mid-range discontinuity on extended flat metal planes. Often these planes are used for antenna calibration (open area test site - OATS) or the plane could be the ground of a semi-anechoic chamber used in Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) testing. The measurement uncertainty of antenna calibration or EMC testing depends on the groundplane's quality, which can be accessed using this method. A vector network analyzer with time-domain option is used to determine the complex-valued input scattering parameter S11,F of an aperture antenna in a monostatic setup. S11,F contains the information desired about the discontinuities and is measured in the frequency domain with high dynamic range. But only after a linear filtering utilizing the Chirp-Z-Transform the obtained time-domain signal S11,T evidence of local and mid-range discontinuities.