Reliable Antenna Measurements in a Near-Field Cylindrical Setup With a Sparsity Promoting Approach

A novel approach for reliable and effective antenna measurements in cylindrical near-field (NF) setups is presented. Starting from a limited set of NF samples acquired on a finite cylindrical probing surface and by exploiting some a priori information on the class of antennas under test (AUTs) to build an overcomplete dictionary of field bases, the proposed method allows one to accurately extrapolate the data well beyond the physical extension of the NF measurement area. Afterward, a compressive sensing (CS)-based method is successfully applied to retrieve a sparse representation of the actual field distribution over the redundant dictionary at hand. Selected results from a wide numerical analysis are shown to assess the effectiveness and the potentialities of the proposed measurement technique.