Improved planar near-field measurement based on data assimilation

Abstract

The planar near-field measurement is widely used for antenna radiation testing because of its compact test space. However, due to the inevitable truncation error in the practical test, the measured radiation pattern of the antenna under test (AUT) is accurate only within certain confidence (angular) interval. In order to improve the measurement accuracy outside the confidence interval, this paper proposes an improved method of planar near-field measurement based on data assimilation. A reasonable mathematical model for the AUT radiation pattern is established so that the simulation data and the practical test data are fused with improved accuracy. The effectiveness of the proposed method for parameter selection has been verified experimentally, compared with the conventional method. In addition, the proposed method indicates a universal approach of complementing the measurement data with simulations or other data sources for improved accuracy.