Alternative field leveling and power control of immunity tests in a reverberation chamber

In this paper an alternative approach for the field leveling and power control of susceptibility tests in a reverberation chamber is presented. The method is based on the measurement of the normal electric field strength component on the walls of the chamber with several electrically small field sensors. These field sensors are readout over radio-frequency detectors and a data acquisition system. In comparison with the conventional chamber validation method the tasks of the general validation and the validation with the equipment under test (EUT) in place are changed. The alternative general validation only checks the proper field uniformity. In contrast the maximum normalized field strength is determined with the EUT in place. Hence, the chamber loading by the EUT has not to be measured separately and the statistical uncertainty of the chamber loading factor is omitted.