Antenna Radiation Pattern Measurements in Reverberation Chamber Using Plane Wave Decomposition

Reverberation chambers (RCs) are electrically large, highly conductive resonant enclosures used as test facilities for radiated emissions and immunity measurements on electronic devices. In recent literature, it has been claimed that RCs can be an interesting alternative to anechoic chambers as facilities for accurately characterizing the radiation pattern of an antenna under test, but this assertion has only been supported by numerical simulations, using elementary dipoles in a scalar two-dimensional RC. On the contrary, in this contribution, a novel technique that allows for the first time to perform actual antenna radiation pattern measurements in RC is presented. In order to demonstrate its validity, the radiation pattern for both E- and H- planes of a horn antenna has been measured in an RC at 10 GHz, in X band, and compared to the ones obtained in anechoic chamber, being the results in good agreement.