Field Trials for Ultrawideband Antenna

A beam pattern verification system in real operating conditions is essential to illustrate the performance and technical challenges of a proposed radio entity. It is key to high-accuracy cosmological and astronomical measurements. For future application on a verification system based on a proposed tightly coupled array, operating from 300 MHz to 1 GHz, a characterization system based on a flying far-field source implementation on an ultrawideband log-periodic antenna is verified in this communication. The far-field flying source is based on a commercially-available unmanned remotely operated Octocopter, equipped with a differential GNSS to determine the sampling point positions. The proposed setup has been validated at 750 MHz and found to be in good agreement with a full-wave prediction. At this stage, the resulting 2D beam pattern flying source characterization shows promising results for ongoing and future aperture array radio astronomy experiments.