Development of automated antenna radiation pattern measurement using rotator application model to increase accuracy

Measurement of antenna radiation pattern is an important process to validate the performance of the antenna. The extensive measurement system usually uses commercial equipment and works automatically. Unfortunately, the material used in an automated system is expensive, includes antenna rotator. For this reason, the majority of antenna measurement laboratories in Indonesia still adopts manual measurement. The problems encountered in manual measurement is low accuracy due to parallax error on reading data from network analyzer, and also the time required to measure an antenna is quite long. This paper proposed an automated antenna radiation pattern measurement system by constructing a two-axis antenna rotator positioner based on microcontroller and computer application program. The proposed system can increase the accuracy of radiation pattern plot and significantly reduce the time measurement. This paper contributed in providing low-cost automated antenna measurement system for utilization in the DTE laboratory University of Indonesia.