On the Application of Sparse Spherical Harmonic Expansion for Fast Antenna Far-Field Measurements

N. Mezieres (1) , Benjamin Fuchs (1) , Laurent Le Coq (1) , J.-M. Lerat (2) , R. Contreres (3) , G.L. Fur (3)

1 IETR - Institut d'Électronique et des Technologies du numéRique
2 LNE - Laboratoire National de Métrologie et d'Essais [Trappes]
3 CNES - Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales - Direction Des Lanceurs.

The characterization of 3-D antenna radiation patterns is time-consuming. The field acquisition duration can be dramatically reduced by leveraging the sparsity of the radiated field spectrum into spherical harmonic basis. Only a small number of measurements points are then necessary to identify the few significant spherical coefficients describing accurately the antenna pattern. In practice, this compressed sensing-based procedure requires carefully chosen settings to work efficiently. The fitting to the data and the field sampling strategy are two crucial points in order to ensure a successful fast antenna measurement procedure. The techniques with experimental validations are proposed to ensure a reliable field interpolation. Estimations of savings in acquisition time are also provided to show the interest of the proposed method.

Keywords: Antenna measurements; antenna radiation patterns; compressed sensing; sparse recovery; spherical vector wave expansion

Domains: Engineering Sciences [physics]

N. Mezieres, Benjamin Fuchs, Laurent Le Coq, J.-M. Lerat, R. Contreres, et al.. On the Application of Sparse Spherical Harmonic Expansion for Fast Antenna Far-Field Measurements. IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, 2020, 19 (5), pp.746-750. ⟨10.1109/LAWP.2020.2978170⟩. ⟨hal-02865296⟩