Reconstruction of the Antenna Far-Field Pattern through a Fast Plane-Polar Scanning

This paper provides the experimental validation of a fast and accurate technique, which allows the reconstruction of the antenna radiation pattern from a minimum number of near-field measurements collected through a plane-polar scanning. This near-field to far-field (NFTFF) transformation technique relies on a nonredundant sampling representation of the voltage acquired by the probe, achieved by modeling the antenna with a double bowl, a very flexible model particularly suitable to deal with antennas having a quasi-planar geometry. The NF data required by the standard plane-rectangular NFTFF transformation are efficiently reconstructed from the nonredundant plane-polar ones by using an optimal sampling interpolation algorithm, thus making possible to get a considerable measurement time saving. The accuracy and practical efficacy of the described technique are assessed by experimental tests carried out at the Antenna Characterization Lab of the University of Salerno.