Reverberation Chamber Techniques for Determining the Radiation and Total Efficiency of Antennas

Published

April 6, 2012

Author(s)

Christopher L. Holloway

Abstract

Reverberation chambers are becoming a popular alternative testing facility for a wide range of electromagnetic applications. Because of the statistical environment created inside a reverberation chamber, they offers a unique test facility. In particular, these chambers are ideal suited for performing radiated power measurements of either an antenna or device under test, as such it is possible to determine the efficiency of antennas. There have been several reverberation chamber techniques proposed over the years for measuring the antenna efficiency, however, these approaches require either the use of a reference antenna (i.e., an antenna with a known efficiency) and/or require one to assume that the two antennas used in the test have identical efficiencies. In this paper, we present three different approaches for determining both the radiation and a efficiencies of an unknown antenna, that overcome these limitations and assumptions. We present a single antenna approach, the two antenna approach, and a three antenna approach. We present measured data for three different antennas in order to compare these three approaches. We also discuss the uncertainties related to these types of measurements.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation

Volume

60

Issue

4

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/TAP.2012.2186263

Keywords

antenna measurements, antenna radiation efficiency, reverberation chambers, total efficiency

Citation

Holloway, C. (2012), Reverberation Chamber Techniques for Determining the Radiation and Total Efficiency of Antennas, IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TAP.2012.2186263 (Accessed July 18, 2024)