Comparative Investigation of Spatial Filtering Techniques for Ground Plane Removal in PEC-Based Automotive Measurements

Radiating performances of vehicle-installed antennas are typically performed in large spherical near-field systems able to accommodate the entire car. Due to the size and weight of the vehicle to be tested, such spherical systems are often nearly hemispherical, and the floor is conductive or covered with absorbers. The main advantage of the first is the ease of the accommodation of the vehicle under test. Conversely, the latter is more time consuming in the setup of the measurements because the absorbers need to be moved in order to be placed around the vehicle. On the other hand, the absorber-covered floors emulate a free-space environment which is a key enabling factor in performing accurate measurements at low frequencies (down to 70 MHz). Moreover, the availability of the free-space response allows easy emulation of the cars’ behaviors over realistic automotive environments (e.g. roads, urban areas etc.) with commercially available tools. Such emulations are instead much more challenging when a conductive floor is considered. Furthermore, the raw measurements over conductive floors are a good approximation of realistic grounds (such as asphalts) only in a limited number of situations. For these reasons, when PEC-based automotive measurements are performed, it is often required to retrieve the free-space response, or equivalently, to remove the effect of the conductive ground.In this paper two spatial-filtering techniques (the spherical modal filtering and the equivalent currents) will be experimentally analyzed and compared to verify their effectiveness in removing the effect of the conductive floor. For this purpose, a scaled automotive PEC-based measurement setup has been implemented considering a small spherical multi-probe system and a 1:12 scaled car model. The two techniques will be analyzed considering two different heights of the scaled car model with respect to the conductive floor.