Assessing and quantifying the effects of planar mathematical absorber reflection suppression technique

Band limiting radiating fields from a finite sized field distribution has been shown to be a highly effective way to eliminate spurious scattered fields from antenna measurements [1, 2, 3]. These techniques have been used with impressive results in many antenna measurement geometries including spherical, cylindrical and planar near-field and far-field [3, 4, 5, 6]. Generally, the objective verification of these suppression techniques on scattered fields can be readily demonstrated, while their impact on the overall facility level uncertainty budget has perhaps been less clear. The use of the NIST 18 term range assessment [7, 8] for error analysis of planar near-field antenna test facilities has become a widely accepted technique for antenna measurement error evaluation. This technique identifies the overall effect on the measurement as well as each of the 18 terms individually. Thus, range assessment evaluation provides an effective way to evaluate the impact of planar MARS processing on a given antenna measurement or planar near-field facility. This paper presents results from a recent range assessment campaign that illustrates and quantifies the impact of MARS processing on the facility level error budget on a large planar near-field antenna test system.