Phaseless Far-Field Gain Measurement of Circularly-Polarized Antennas Using Artificial Anisotropic Polarizers

Abstract

A novel phaseless far-field gain measurement method of circularly-polarized (CP) antennas using artificial anisotropic polarizers (AAP) is proposed in this paper. This method utilizes two identical antennas of any type, a linearly-polarized (LP) standard-gain horn (SGH) antenna and two identical AAP to obtain the CP gain of the antenna under test (AUT). No phase measurement or probe rotation is required. The essential part of the method is to degenerate the gain characteristics of the probe antenna into two orthogonal CP components. Experimental results for a conical CP SGH operating between 50 to 67 GHz show gain error is within 1 dB. The measurement method is useful for gain measurements of CP antennas especially at millimeter-wave and terahertz range.