Application of diagnosis technique for reflection cancelling in antenna measurements

An improvement of the traditional methods of array antenna diagnosis based on Fourier transformation and its application to the reduction of the effect of the reflections on the antenna measurement systems is proposed. The method uses far field information which it is possible to reconstruct the excitations of the elements and the field over the aperture of the array antennas, providing the module and the phase. The diagnosis method is based on the holographic techniques [1]. However, some improvements are performed on that method in order to get more exact results on the amplitude and phase, due to an increase of the visible region of the Plane Wave Spectrum (PWS). A traditional application of this kind of methods is the error detection, for example, errors in the alignment of the phase, connections or general structure of the array antennas. So, without a similar technique for antenna diagnosis, it would be necessary to check that elements, connections or structure. Therefore, when there are a lot of elements it would be a waste of time. In addition, as it has said, there is a new application for the diagnosis technique, the reduction of the reflections when an antenna is measured.