Low-cost Automatic Antenna Polarization Measurement system

Abstract

This paper presents low-cost automatic antenna polarization measurement system. The portable vector network analyzer (VNA) namely nanoVNA is employed instead of an expensive high-precision laboratory VNA. NanoVNA supports frequency range of 50 kHz to 1.5 GHz that provide a good capability to measure an electrical characteristics of antennas, filters, duplexers, amplifiers and etc. The wide-band Vivaldi antenna is employed as the measurement electric field probe which is supported by the rotating shaft and drive by stepping motor. MALAB GUI post-processing is implemented to automatically control the stepping motor and NanoVNA. The orthogonal components of probe amplitudes and phases of antenna under test (AUT) are measured by NanoVNA. The axial-ratio value of AUT polarization can be obtained by MALAB post processing. Therefore, the proposed low-cost automatic antenna polarization measurement system is well suited to understand antenna polarization with hands-on experience.