Investigation of Different Levels of Probe Compensation in Spherical Near Field Measurements Performed with Wideband and Dual-Polarized Probes

Abstract

Full probe compensation techniques for spherical near field antenna measurements have recently been proposed and validated with success. Such techniques allow the use of antennas with more than a decade of bandwidth as near field probes so that multi-service/frequency measurements can be performed dramatically reducing the number of probes and hence decreasing the downtime between measurements. By using dual-polarized probes the measurement efficiency can be further improved since two orthogonal field components are measured simultaneously. The possible differences between the pattern radiated by the two ports of the probe should sometimes be considered to maintain the overall measurement accuracy. A full PC technique accounting for generic dual-polarized probes was validated in a previous publication considering a wideband dual-polarized probe in the 0.4-6GHz frequency band. In this paper the validation is expanded to the 6-18GHz band considering as probe an antenna of the same family of the previous one.