Near-Field Gain Measurements Using the Distance Averaging Method: Linear Scanning Versus Matrix Scanning

Abstract

Antenna gain can be measured in a multipath site by moving the antenna under test away from the probe antenna at different distances, and by assessing a normalized transfer function as an average figure over the entire data set. In an earlier work, we provided a statistical explanation to the reduction of the multipath effects. Another possible explanation is based on the synthetic aperture principle, by assimilating the set of positions of the probe antenna to an antenna array. In this paper, we compare linear scanning to matrix scanning in order to draw optimal choice criteria for the grid of measuring positions. Measurements were performed on a Vivaldi antenna, in the near-field zone.