Antenna measurement processing for diagnostics and filtering based on integral equations

This communication presents promising applications of the integral equation formulation of the inverse source problem. The technique is based on the extraction of equivalent sources on a 3-D closed surface enclosing the Antenna Under Test (AUT) from near or far field measured radiation patterns upon rigorous application of the equivalence principle. Such sources allow malfunction detection and design improvements, investigation of abnormalities in antenna measurements, removal of unwanted radiation caused by spurious effects besides the more conventional Near Field-Far Field and Near Field-Near Field transformations. The main advantage of the integral equation formulation over the wave expansion technique is its geometry-independence, in principle being able to accommodate efficiently for atypical geometries (not uncommon in real applications) both for the radiator and the measurement range (including truncated versions of canonical ranges).