Practical considerations in compressed spherical near-field measurements

The major drawback of Spherical Near-Field (SNF) measurements is the comparatively long measurement time, since the scanning of a whole sphere enclosing an Antenna Under Test (AUT) is required to calculate the Spherical Mode Coefficients (SMCs) required for the computation of the far field. Since the SMCs prove to be sparse under certain conditions, efforts have been made to apply compressed-sensing techniques to reduce the measurement time by acquiring a smaller number of sampling points. These approaches have been successfully tested in simulation using classically acquired measured data. This decouples the measurements from practical problems, such as basis mismatch due to the finite precision of the mechanical positioner and environment effects. In this paper, results from a sparse data acquisition performed with a physical system are reported. To decouple the error introduced by the approach itself from the error introduced by non-idealities in the measurement system, an AUT is measured using both traditional near-field sampling and compressed near-field sampling. The classically acquired data is used both as reference and as source to simulate a synthetic compressed measurement. The effects introduced by real considerations are calculated by comparison between the synthetic compressed measurement and the acquired one, while the error of both is evaluated by comparison to the reference measurement. The results further demonstrate the viability of this method to accelerate SNF measurements and pave the way for further research.