Time-domain spherical near-field antenna measurement system employing a switched continuous-wave hardware gating technique

A time-domain spherical near-field antenna measurement system capable of gating out erroneous signal components, which arise due to multipath propagation in nonideal anechoic chambers, is presented. The developed hardware (HW) gating technique evaluates a switched sinusoidal signal, which is synthesized by an application-specific pulse generator and acquired by either a commercial real-time digitizing oscilloscope or an application-specific equivalent-time sampling receiver developed for this particular purpose. The low-cost measurement system has been optimized for acquisition speed, dynamic range, and resolution. Its operating frequency range covers 1.58 GHz, and it is applicable to antennas exhibiting a typical 3-dB bandwidth in excess of 400 MHz. Test measurements of an omnidirectional and a directional antenna, respectively, have been carried out to demonstrate the performance of the novel HW gating technique. It is shown that the HW gating technique can significantly improve the absolute average deviation of the erroneous 3-D far-field pattern.