Utilizing partial knowledge of phase differences in convex optimization for amplitude-only near-field far-field transformation

Near-field far-field transformations for phaseless antenna measurements suffer from suboptimal solutions due to the lack of information contained in amplitude-only data. Publications on the more general problem of phase retrieval have been able to state conditions on the number of amplitude measurements required for various algorithms to find the globally optimal solution. In this contribution, a possible and practical approach of acquiring the necessary amplitude measurements in terms of phase differences is presented. Simulation and measurement results verify the benefit of phase differences.