Measurement Field Source for Antenna Placement in Space Applications

Measured antennas as field sources in numerical simulation is by now a consolidated method to investigate deployed antenna performance. Typical applications are situations where a measurement of the entire scenario or a full-wave representation is unfeasible or unavailable [1]-[5]. Antenna placement on complex platforms such as satellites are good examples of such application. In these scenarios, the antennas are often supplied by a third party. Thus the mechanical and electronic characteristics needed for a full-wave representation of the antenna are likely unavailable or not in the right format for use by the Computational Electromagnetic (CEM) tool. To overcome this problem, the antenna can be fully characterized by measurement. The equivalent field source, compatible with the CEM tool, can then be derived, as a Huygens box, using an Equivalent Current (EQC) expansion [6]-[7].The measured field source was applied in the investigation of a GNSS antenna on a mock-up of the Sentinel satellite designed, manufactured and measured by RUAG SPACE [8]. This scenario was investigated in [9]-[10]. In this paper, the accuracy investigation is extended to include different CEM tools [11]-[12] and comparison with measurements of the full mock-up.