Fast and accurate measurement of on-axis gain and on-axis polarization at a finite distance

In this paper, a technique for fast and accurate measurement of on-axis gain and on-axis polarization characteristics of antennas, such as Standard Gain Horns, compact range feed horns, and near-field probes, is described. The proposed gain determination procedure is a modification of the far-field substitution technique in which the measurement distance is defined between the phase centres of the antennas. The location of the phase centre of the antenna under test (AUT) is found from a quick pattern measurement consisting of only four cuts including the main and diagonal planes. Additionally, in order to reduce the amount of measurement data and thus measurement time, the phase centre location is found on a sparse frequency grid and the values in the intermediate points are found by interpolation. The antenna polarization is determined from the amplitude/phase frequency sweeps with two orthogonal AUT orientations versus a polarization calibrated probe. A complete set of measurements for one AUT takes less than two hours. The measurement uncertainty for the gain is comparable to the one obtained with the near-field substitution technique and typically does not exceed 0.1 dB (1 sigma).