Antenna standards and laboratories in Europe

This paper sets out to present an overview of antenna standards and laboratories within Europe. In this context, Europe is limited geographically to the member nations of the European Union (EU), formerly the European Community, and the European Space Agency (ESA). In addition to these two organizations, there exists several organs within Europe whose aims are to define, coordinate and implement standards, laboratory certification, multilateral acceptance of testing and calibration as well as international acceptance of the same. These include ETSI, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute and EAL, the European Accreditation of Laboratories, which deals with the practical aspects of laboratory accreditation and international cooperation. ESA, through the Electromagnetics Division of ESTEC, has been active in not only defining the need for European sourced antenna gain standards, but has embarked on a project of antenna range validation as well as defining standardization of validation procedures to better monitor and improve the performance of antenna test laboratories working on ESA projects