A nonredundant probe compensated NF–FF transformation with spherical scanning

The use of near field-far field (NF-FF) transformation techniques for determining antenna patterns allows one to overcome those drawbacks which make it impractical to perform pattern measurements on a conventional FF range. Among the NF-FF transformation techniques, that employing spherical scanning attracts considerable attention, since it gives the full antenna pattern coverage. Our aim is to remove the ideal probe assumption used by other methods and to develop an efficient probe compensated NF-FF transformation technique with spherical scanning tailored for elongated antennas. To this end, results concerning the nonredundant sampling representations of the EM field are properly extended to the representation of the probe output voltage. Then, an efficient interpolation algorithm is developed for recovering the voltage from a nonredundant number of its samples. This allows one to determine the NF data required by the classic probe compensated NF-FF transformation technique with spherical scanning.