Development of reverberation chamber for accurate measurements of mobile phones and mobile phone antennas

Reverberation chambers have been used for quite some time for EMC measurements. Some early work was also done in antenna measurements, but the achieved accuracy was not sufficient for the method to be accepted. The paper describes the development of a reverberation chamber for antenna measurements and the applications for which it can be used. The disadvantage of using a reverberation chamber for measurement of small antennas and wireless terminals is that it is not possible to generate radiation diagrams. In some cases these are needed to fulfil specifications or by customers used to seeing the diagram as the only way of specifying their products. We know that some would like to use MEG to specify radiation, and this is not easily achieved in a totally uniform multipath environment. On the other hand we have met a growing understanding that this method is suitable for most of the measurements that have to be done throughout the development and evaluation of small wireless terminals: measurement of antenna characteristics (passive unit or cable fed terminal); total radiated power; head loss and prequalification of SAR values; receive sensitivity; spurious radiation.