Analysis of a navigation antenna installed on a civil airplane

On-ground measurements using full-scale airplanes demand a large open area that may not be completely free from other reflections than those coming from the ground. Moreover, if measurements are to be done in an airport, the electromagnetic environment may be very noisy, which can affect the measurement accuracy. During the on-ground tests that we performed, the presence of an airplane close to the measurement site could not be avoided. This contributed to inaccuracies obtained in the measured results as previously discussed. In the other directions, where the presence of this aircraft is not supposed to influence the measurements significantly, the agreement between the measurements and the numerical predictions was very good.