New approach to antenna testing from near field phaseless data: the cylindrical scanning

A new method for recovering the complex near and far field from amplitude distributions collected over two near zone surfaces is proposed. By exploiting the mathematical properties of the radiated fields and choosing an appropriate functional of the data, the solution is found through the minimisation of the introduced functional. All details of the resulting iterative procedure are worked out for the cylindrical scanning in the three dimensional vector case where the implementation turns out to be effective thanks to a proper use of the FFT algorithm. It is shown that this new approach allows the solution to be obtained starting from a completely arbitrary point, so avoiding the local minima problem.<>