A three-antenna technique for determining the total and radiation efficiencies of antennas in reverberation chambers

In this paper, we discuss a three-antenna reverberation-chamber method that allows for the determination of the antenna efficiency. While reverberation chambers have been used in the past for determining antenna efficiency, the previous approaches required knowledge of the efficiency of a reference antenna. The approach discussed in this paper allows one to determine the efficiency of one or all three antennas, and does not require one to know the efficiency of any of the antennas under test beforehand. The technique combines both time-domain and frequency-domain processed data, collected in reverberation-chamber experiments. Combining data in these two domains for three sets of experiments (a set for each two-antenna combination of the three antennas under test) allows for the determination of the efficiencies of the three unknown antennas. In this paper, we discuss the technique and present experimental data in order to illustrate its validity.