Efficient reconstruction of the pattern radiated by a long antenna from data acquired via a spherical-spiral-scanning near-field facility

This paper provides the experimental assessment of an effective near-field-to-far-field (NF-FF) transformation technique with spherical-spiral scanning, particularly suitable for long antennas. Such a technique allows a remarkable measurement-time saving, due to the use of continuous and synchronized movements of the positioning systems, and due to the reduced number of required near-field measurements. This is made possible by a non-redundant sampling representation of the voltage measured by the probe, obtained by using the unified theory of spiral scans for non-spherical antennas, and adopting a prolate-ellipsoidal source modeling. The near-field data needed by the classical spherical near-field-to-far-field transformation are then efficiently retrieved from those acquired along the spiral by an optimal sampling interpolation formula.