Small Antenna Measurements in Spherical Nearfield Systems

Small antennas and other modern antenna applications are using increasingly higher frequencies while demanding very rapid development and testing cycles. A fast, reliable and accurate way to exhaustively determine antenna performance is based on spherical near field measurement techniques combined with probe array technology.The StarLab spherical near field measurement system has recently evolved to cover the entire frequency band from 800 MHz to 18 GHz as discussed in [1, 2, 3]. The system is based on patented probe array technology and advanced modulated scattering technique, A-MST [4, 5]. The measurement system is mainly aimed at the characterization of wireless terminals for development, pre-qualification or pass/fail production purposes. It is flexible, with functionalities that can be easily extended depending on the needs of the user. The equipment can be interfaced with different RF measurement devices in order to perform either passive or active measurements. This paper describes the innovative design aspects of the evolved measurement system and present results from the validation campaign. The use of diagnostic and analysis software modules for efficient antenna testing is also presented.