Hybrid Fast Fourier Transform-plane wave based near-field far-field transformation for "body of revolution" antenna measurement grids

Near-field measurement and transformation techniques are widely applied to characterize radiation patterns of antennas. Spherical and cylindrical near-field measurements have been researched extensively and various techniques with different probe compensation capabilities and complexities exist. Among those techniques applicable for (almost) arbitrary probes, the crucial computational efficiency has been achieved through the use of Fast Fourier Transform based preprocessing of the measurement data. It is shown in this paper that the Fast Fourier Transform based preprocessing can also be utilized in conjunction with the plane wave based fully probe-corrected near-field far-field transformation with low numerical complexity. The collection of probe signals is split into smaller subsets for individual orthogonal azimuthal Fourier modes by an Inverse Fast Fourier Transform. These smaller subsets can be transformed to the far field very efficiently with full probe correction. The technique presented in this paper is applicable for arbitrary "body of revolution" antenna measurement grids, including the important cases of cylindrical and spherical measurement grids. The "body of revolution" grids are rotationally symmetric around the z-axis and the probe signals must be available equidistantly in α.