Estimating the number of independent samples in reverberation chamber measurements from sample differences

Reverberation chamber measurements suffer from statistical fluctuations in the average power of a measured sequence. The standard deviation of these fluctuations depends on the number of independent samples N_ind in the sequence. A common method for estimating N_ind is based on calculating the autocorrelation function of the sequence. A method is presented here that is simpler, yet comparable in accuracy and precision. In the presented method, N_ind is calculated from the sequence of differences between neighboring measurement samples. Simulated sequences are used to compare different variants of the presented method and the autocorrelation function method. Examples with measured data are also presented.