UCLA’s portable millimeter-wave bipolar planar near-field antenna measurement system

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce such a design: a novel portable and inexpensive millimeter-wave measurement system. The complete system development, from the positional scanner design and implementation, the custom measurement system software, the post-processing options including phase-less measurements, and the first standard gain horn measurement, will be presented in this paper. The main goals of this millimeter-wave antenna measurement system was to make the design portable, affordable, and practical. The bipolar scanning technique, previously developed at UCLA, offers advantages that address these concerns. In particular, the technique offers space-saving features that help reduce the footprint of the system and also eliminates linear motion, simplifying the mechanical complexity and design implementation. These advantages made this technique preferable over other planar techniques such as plane-rectangular or plane-polar scanning. Using this technique, a completely new and custom measurement system was developed for measuring millimeter-wave antennas.