Probe positioning errors in planar near field measurements. A plane wave synthesis approach

It is shown how the plane wave synthesis approach is a useful way to assess the effect of errors in near field measurements. For the planar case it is shown that small positioning errors orthogonal to the measurement plane are equivalent to random phase errors. On the other hand, errors contained of the measurement plane are of smaller magnitude but more difficult to characterize. The approach shown is also valid to assess the effect of positioning errors for different transformation algorithms.