Wideband experimental characterization of differential antennas

A procedure to characterize the gain and the input impedance of differential antennas from a mixed S parameters measurement is presented. Measurements are performed with a differential probe to connect differential antennas under test and the single-ended ports of a vector network analyzer. This element is modeled with transmission lines in cascade and its effect in the measurement is corrected. Three wire antennas are characterized and a good agreement is found between experimental data and numerical results obtained using the Time Domain Integral Equation technique.