Estimating and Reducing Uncertainty in Reverberation-Chamber Characterization at Millimeter-Wave Frequencies

This contribution provides techniques for accurately characterizing uncertainty when measuring total radiated power (TRP) at millimeter-wave frequencies. The setup is based on the reverberation chamber as a well-known measurement environment capable of performing TRP measurements of wireless devices. We show that by applying various stirring techniques, we can reduce the random component of measurement uncertainty to around 2%. We use a model for estimating the uncertainty for TRP measurements based on the K factor, which is compared with uncertainties calculated from relative power measurements and we show excellent agreement. We perform a significance test to confirm that the uncertainty due to the limited number of mode-stirred samples dominates over the uncertainty due to the lack of spatial uniformity. The observed uncertainty is also compared with an ideal chamber situation and shows good agreement.