Far-field uncertainty due to instrumentation errors in multilevel plane wave based near-field far-field transformed planar near-field measurements

The sensitivity of the multilevel plane wave based near-field far-field transformation algorithm against receiver errors in planar near-field measurements is investigated. The errors include the effect of the receivers uncertainty in phase and amplitude measurements as well as the system phase errors due to flexing cables. The errors, generated in systematic and random fashion according to the specific scenario, are superimposed on the collected near-field data and transformed using the multilevel transformation technique. In order to exclude the effect of other measurement and environmental errors, synthetic field data from electric dipoles is used to model the antenna under test. The error behavior is compared with the standard near-field far-field transformation technique employing 2D Fast Fourier Transform (FFT).