Electronic mode stirring for reverberation chambers

A modal analysis and a uniform-field approximation are presented for the fields in an idealized two-dimensional, rectangular cavity excited by an electric line source. The model is used to evaluate the effectiveness of frequency stirring, an alternative to mechanical stirring in reverberation chamber immunity measurements. Numerical results indicate that good field uniformity (standard deviation less than 1 dB) can be obtained with a bandwidth of 10 MHz at a center frequency of 4 GHz. The bandwidth requirement is determined primarily by the number of modes excited, and higher frequencies can achieve the same field uniformity with a smaller bandwidth because of the higher mode density. Cavity excitation by two single-frequency sources is also analyzed