Antenna Diagnostics and Characterization Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents a compact, low-cost unmanned aerial system for antenna measurement. The proposed system overcomes existing limitations in terms of unmanned aerial vehicle positioning and data geo-referring accuracy using a real-time kinematic positioning system to achieve centimeter-level accuracy. Amplitude-only measurements acquired using a low-cost power sensor are processed by means of the phaseless sources reconstruction method. This is an iterative phase retrieval technique that allows recovering an equivalent currents distribution, which characterizes the antenna under test (AUT). From these equivalent currents, near-field to far-field transformation is applied to calculate the AUT radiation pattern. This contribution also analyzes probe antenna characterization and the impact of positioning and geo-referring accuracy on the radiation pattern. Two application examples of antenna measurement at S- and C-bands using the implemented system are presented.