Shielding Effectiveness Measurement of an Electrically Large Enclosure Using One Antenna

Abstract

A new method is proposed to measure the shielding effectiveness (SE) of an electrically large enclosure. Traditionally, the SE measurement requires at least two (in an anechoic chamber) or three antennas (in a reverberation chamber). In this paper, only one antenna is needed in the whole measurement procedure. There is no requirement to use a reference antenna. It is interesting to note that if the aperture of the enclosure under test (EUT) can be covered (by using a conductive sheet or aluminum foil), the SE can be measured quickly by comparing the Q factor or the decay time of the covered and uncovered EUT. Measurements have been conducted to evaluate and verify the proposed method. The results are compared with those obtained using the nested reverberation chamber method; limitations of the proposed method are also discussed and identified. It is found that when the EUT is well shielded, the uncertainty of the proposed method could be relatively large. Nevertheless, the proposed method does offer a new simple and efficient approach to measure the SE of an electrically large enclosure.