The influence of finite measurement accuracy on the SWE-to-PWE antenna diagnostics technique

A new antenna diagnostics technique based on the transformation of the spherical wave expansion (SWE) into the plane wave expansion (PWE) is proposed. The new technique allows the recovery of the plane wave spectrum in the visible region, and in principle also in part of the invisible region, from data acquired during a spherical near-field measurement. From the PWE the aperture field can subsequently be calculated. While the fundamental properties of the SWE-to-PWE transformation have been reported in previous articles, we concentrate here on the influence of non-ideal measurements aspects on this diagnostics technique. In order to isolate different measurement inaccuracies, the investigation is based on simulations.