Quiet Zone Quality of a Plane Wave Generator inside an Over-Moded Waveguide Chamber Emulating a Variable Angle of Incidence

We investigate the use of a hybrid over-the-air (OTA) measurement chamber to emulate far-field testing conditions. The focus has been on the generation of a plane wave arriving at an arbitrary angle-of-arrival (AoA) to the device-under-test (DUT) without mechanical steering. The chamber consists of an oversized waveguide (WG) and a planar array antenna with adaptive beamforming. A modified linear constrained minimum variance (LCMV) beamforming algorithm is used to form a quiet zone (QZ) in the DUT region by using the reflections from the WG’s metal walls. The LCMV beamformer formulation has been extended to achieve a volumetric QZ with the desired amplitude and phase uniformity. Numerical studies for the QZ size corresponding to an FR1 base station demonstrate promising results with the low levels of amplitude and phase variation. The AoA coverage of this chamber meets 3GPP specification requirements for OTA conformance testing of base stations with active antenna systems.