Electric dipole based synthetic data generation for probe-corrected near-field antenna measurements

Measurements in the antenna near field allow to compute the far-field radiation pattern by a postprocessing near-field far-field transformation. These algorithms use equivalent sources to model the radiation behavior of the antenna and have to consider the field probe influence present in near-field antenna measurements when relating the measured probe signals to the equivalent sources. In order to test and validate near-field transformation algorithms without errors introduced by the measurement setup and environment, synthetic data is often used. However, in order to generate realistic near-field data the probe effects on the measurement have to be considered. In this paper a synthetic data generation technique is shown which models the antenna as well as the probe by distributions of electric dipoles. The probe signals are obtained by evaluating the dyadic Green´s function of free space for all antenna-probe-dipole combinations and finally superimposing them. This allows to synthesize near-field measurement scenarios with manifold antennas and probes very flexibly. The technique is applied to validate the plane wave based near-field far-field transformation algorithm.