Fully Digital AESA Antennas Testing

Nowadays digitalization is becoming more and more pervasive in most scientific fields. Radar technology is not an exception and fully digital systems are becoming attractive thanks to recent developments of digital architectures. The conventional RF antenna testing approach cannot be applied to fully digital phased array systems. This paper resumes a series of strategies and considerations about the generation of a reference signal in the RF domain to be used to compensate the phase variation over the measurement time. The proposed measurement setup for fully digital AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) systems consists of a couple of I-Q modulator and demodulator, locked to the system under test in order to ensure phase coherence of transmitting and receiving pulses.