Small and ultra wide band antennas : A new challenge for characterisation

Research activities on antenna miniaturisation are particularly important to meet systems' requirements in terms of compact, integrated antennas including broadband antennas for high data rate communications. IETR has been involved with such a topic for several years. As far as compact and broadband antennas are concerned, one has to deal with specific characterisation issues. Among different factors, the environment effects and the excitation devices are key parameters to consider. This paper focuses on some of these parameters and their influence on gain, impedance or efficiency measurements, and describes some possible solutions to control the reproducibility of these measurements. In this paper we present different hard point we have identified during our measurements. The advantages of some specific test environments such as reverberation chamber and near field test set up was also discussed.