Direct Measurements of Stationary Antennas on a Compact Antenna Test Range

The work under review concerns a new technique for the measurement of the radiation behaviour of reflector antennas under the restriction that the antenna itself is not rotated during the measurement. This condition exists for example with space-qualified antennas that are often very fragile and that would deform when rotated. Instead of rotating the antenna, the Compact Range feed is moved so that the generated wave is scanned and is incident on the test antenna from a certain angle. The properties of the generated wave deteriorate due to the defocusing, but these effects are small so that accurate measurements are still possible. This is both indicated by computer simulations and by experiments.