Far-field pattern reconstruction from positioning errors affected near-field data acquired via helicoidal scanning

In this paper, an effective technique to compensate the positioning errors in a near-field—far-field (NF-FF) transformation with helicoidal scanning for elongated antennas is presented and validated both numerically and experimentally. It relies on a nonredundant sampling representation of the voltage measured by the probe, obtained by considering the antenna as enclosed in a cylinder ended in two half-spheres. An iterative scheme is used to reconstruct the helicoidal NF data at the points fixed by the representation from the acquired irregularly spaced ones. Once the helicoidal data have been retrieved, those needed by a classical NF-FF transformation with cylindrical scanning are efficiently evaluated by using an optimal sampling interpolation algorithm. Some numerical tests, assessing the accuracy of the approach and its stability with respect to random errors affecting the data, are reported. Experimental tests performed at the Antenna Characterization Lab of the University of Salerno further confirm the validity of the proposed technique.