Thinned-grid near-field bi-polar antenna measurements

The invention of the planar bi-polar scanning method has been a promising innovation in near-field antenna measurements. A major advantage of the bi-polar method is the compactness of the scanner, which involves exclusively rotational movement. However, during the operation of the bi-polar antenna laboratory (which we had developed) we found that it was the construction of the scanner arm and the redundancy of the sample points that created problems. The construction of the scanner arm required only several engineering efforts, but sample redundancy unnecessarily extended the duration of the measurements. As a result, the drift effects in the test setup, the file sizes and the computing time were increased. To overcome this drawback a thinning of the bi-polar grid was proposed.