Error margin for antenna gain measurements

Author

Cable, Vaughn P.

Author_Institution

Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA

Volume

1

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

262

Abstract

The specification of measured antenna gain is incomplete without knowing the error of the measurement. Also, unless gain is measured many times for a single antenna or over many identical antennas, the uncertainty or error in a single measurement is only an estimate. In this paper, we examine in detail a typical error budget for common antenna gain measurements. We also compute the gain uncertainty for a specific UHF horn test that was recently performed on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) antenna range. The paper concludes with comments on these results and how they compare with the "unofficial" JPL range standard of ± 1/2 dB.

Keywords

UHF antennas; antenna testing; gain measurement; horn antennas; measurement errors; test facilities; Jet Propulsion Laboratory; UHF horn test; antenna gain measurements; error budget; error margin; gain uncertainty; measurement error; unofficial JPL antenna range standard; Antenna measurements; Gain measurement; Horn antennas; Laboratories; Performance evaluation; Performance gain; Propulsion; Testing; UHF antennas; UHF measurements;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Antennas and Propagation Society International Symposium, 2002. IEEE

Print_ISBN

0-7803-7330-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APS.2002.1016298

Filename

1016298