Far-field pattern reconstruction from a nonredundant plane-polar near-field sampling arrangement: experimental testing

An efficient probe-compensated near-field – far-field (NF–FF) transformation with plane-polar scanning, particularly suitable for quasi-planar antennas, is experimentally assessed in this letter. It exploits the nonredundant sampling representations of electromagnetic fields and adopts an oblate ellipsoid to model the antenna under test. A two-dimensional optimal sampling interpolation expansion is employed to accurately recover the NF data needed by the standard plane-rectangular NF–FF transformation from the nonredundant plane-polar ones collected by the probe. A remarkable reduction of the number of NF data to be acquired and of the related measurement time is so obtainable. Some results of the experimental tests, performed at the UNISA Antenna Characterization Lab and assessing the effectiveness of such a NF–FF transformation technique, are reported.