The planar wide-mesh grid: an effective scanning for far-field reconstruction

A fast and accurate near-field-far-field (NF-FF) transformation technique with plane-polar scanning has been recently developed (Bucci, O.M. et al., 2000) by considering the antenna under test (AUT) as enclosed in an oblate ellipsoid, a source modelling particularly suitable to deal with quasi-planar antennas. Such a technique is based on the theoretical results concerning the nonredundant sampling representations of the radiated electromagnetic (EM) fields (Bucci, O.M. et al., 1998) and allows one to lower the number of needed NF data in a significant way, without losing the efficiency. Analogous results have been obtained (D´Agostino, F. et al., 2003) with reference to the NF-FF transformation with bipolar scanning. The paper extends the nonredundant sampling representations to plane-rectangular scanning to obtain a remarkable reduction of the data needed when using it. An innovative scanning technique results: the planar wide-mesh scanning (PWMS). A two-dimensional optimal sampling interpolation (OSI) formula is then developed for reconstructing the NF data required by the classical probe compensated NF-FF transformation with plane-rectangular scanning from the knowledge of those acquired by the PWMS.