Very Fast Measurements of Effective Polarization Diversity Gain in a Reverberation Chamber

Diversity is a very effective method to reduce the effect of fading due to multipath in wireless communication. Improvements of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of more than 10 dB at a 1% cumulative probability level can be achieved. This diversity gain can be measured in a real environment, i.e. drive tests, estimated from measured 3D patterns, or measured in a reverberation chamber. Measurements in the reverberation chamber offer many advantages. It creates an artificial, fully controlled and repeatable Rayleigh environment in which measurements are simple, cost effective, and very fast. This paper presents several new measurements of effective polarization diversity gain, where the measurement time is one minute per antenna configuration.