A Measurement System for the Complex Far-Field of Physically Large Antenna Arrays Under Noisy Conditions Utilizing the Equivalent Electric Current Method

Precipitation in the form of snow or rain could severely degrade the performance of large antenna arrays, in particular if knowledge about the beam shape and pointing direction in absolute numbers is necessary. In this paper, a method of estimating the far-field of each individual antenna element using the equivalent electric current approach is presented. Both a least squares estimator and a Kalman filter was used to solve the resulting system of equation and their performance was compared. Simulation results shows that the estimated far-field for one antenna element is very accurate if there is no noise on the signal. During noisier conditions the Kalman filter gives less noisy results while the systematic errors are slightly larger compared to the least squares estimator.