Application of the planar bi-polar near-field method to antenna measurements and diagnostics

A laboratory for bi-polar planar near-field measurements was designed and installed. For the needs of the laboratory an original software was written and verified. The laboratory is being tested in order to eliminate the detected errors and to introduce improvements when such a need appears. The results substantiated two major advantages of the bi-polar method-the large valid angle and the compactness of the scanner. A drawback of the method is the sophisticated algorithm for far-field calculations. The key problem in the development of the scanner is the design of the arm and of the probe-driving set. An important factor which provides potentiality for shortening the duration of the measurement is the reduction of redundancy at the non-uniformly distributed sampling points. To achieve this goal it is recommended to differentiate the arc lengths. The extension of the frequency range towards lower values can be achieved when the weight and the size of the measuring probe are reduced.