Phaseless Antenna Characterization by Effective Aperture Field and Data Representations

The problem of antenna characterization from phaseless near-field data is addressed by appropriate use of the available information on the Antenna Under Test (AUT) and on the scanning geometry to provide efficient representations for both the unknowns and the data. Such a strategy allows improving the reliability and the accuracy of the proposed characterization algorithm and, at the same time, shortens the overall measurement process. An extensive numerical and experimental analysis, together with a comparison with existing approaches, endorses the algorithm reliability and accuracy and confirms its usefulness for antennas having a general radiating (vector) behavior, i.e., either focusing or non-focusing.