Robust and fast near-field antenna measurement technique

Traditional near-field antenna measurements use the sampling theorem to reconstruct the antenna pattern perfectly. However, a large number of measurement points are required for this approach. To address this problem, in this study, we propose a technique to accelerate the near-field antenna measurement, which is achieved by sparse E-field sampling in the region where the E-field changes smoothly and dense sampling in the region where the field changes rapidly. Further, our approach ensures robustness of measurement; the E-field information need not be known before carrying out measurements. Our experimental results demonstrate that our technique can reduce the number of measuring points by at least 64.9% when measuring two different patterns (15-GHz horn antenna with θ = 0° and 10°).