Les techniques de mesure de diagramme de rayonnement d’antenne actuelles partagent un paradigme commun qui stipule que l’information utile est exclusivement portée par le signal de test généré. Cela implique un effort mécanique fastidieux en faisant tourner l'antenne sous test ou en déplaçant le système de sondes afin de couvrir des angles de mesure différents jusqu'à ce qu'une caractérisation complète soit effectuée ; une limitation qui est généralement surmontée en utilisant des systèmes multisondes coûteux. En outre, toute réflexion provenant du site de mesure et des équipements de test est considérée comme parasite perturbant le signal de test et est ainsi minimisée.Dans cette thèse, un concept de mesure du diagramme de rayonnement d'antenne remettant en cause ce paradigme commun est présenté comme un moyen d'accélérer le processus de caractérisation en utilisant des systèmes économiques. Le paradigme proposé consiste en la génération d'un ensemble d'échos contrôlées, en utilisant des configurations impliquant des plaques réfléchissantes, qui contribueraient directement à la mesure en couvrant différents angles, et récupérer les informations portées par l'ensemble des signaux générés simultanément. Une diversité fréquentielle est introduite afin de générer un système d'équations équilibré où le vecteur inconnu contenant les valeurs du diagramme de rayonnement est récupéré en inversant un problème matriciel. Par conséquent, une attention considérable est accordée au conditionnement du modèle mathématique afin d'assurer la stabilité et la robustesse du systèmeTrois configurations de différents niveaux de complexité en termes d'échos contrôlés sont étudiées, en mettant l'accent sur la configuration la plus simple impliquant un seul écho contrôlé. Des modèles ont été mis au point, avec des contraintes de conception des configurations proposées en termes de dimensionnement et de bandes passante de fonctionnement, mettant en évidence la viabilité mathématique du concept. Les aspects pratiques ont également été évalués en étudiant la tolérance des modèles développés vis-à-vis des erreurs systématiques, ainsi qu’à l'impact de l’application d'un ensemble d’hypothèses simplificatrices. La faisabilité du concept ainsi que son utilité pour accélérer le processus de caractérisation par rapport aux techniques classiques ont été mises en évidence par des simulations numériques. Ce travail ouvre la porte à l'exploitation des échos, généralement considérés comme perturbateurs, dans un contexte de mesure d’antennes. / Current antenna radiation pattern measurement techniques share a common paradigm which states that useful information is exclusively carried by the generated test signal. This implies an excessive, time consuming, mechanical effort by rotating the antenna under test or displacing the probe system in order to cover different measurement angles until a complete scan is performed; a limitation that is typically overcome using costly multi-probe systems. Moreover, any reflection from the measurement site and test equipment is considered spurious as it perturbs the test signal and thus is minimized.In this thesis, an antenna radiation pattern measurement concept challenging this common paradigm is introduced as a mean of accelerating the characterization process using cost-efficient systems. The proposed paradigm consists in the generation of a set of controlled echoes, using set-ups involving highly-reflective plates, which would directly contribute to the measurement alongside the line-of-sight signal by covering different measurement angles, and retrieving the ARP information carried by the set of all generated signals concurrently. Frequency diversity is used in order to generate a balanced system of equations where the unknown ARP vector is retrieved by inverting a matrix problem. Consequently, a considerable attention is paid into the conditioning of the mathematical model in order to ensure the system stability and accuracy.Three configurations of different complexity levels in terms of controlled echoes are studied, with focus on the simplest configuration involving a single controlled echo. Models have been developed with design guidelines for the proposed configurations in terms of set-up dimensions and operating frequency bandwidth highlighting the mathematical viability of the concept. Practical issues were also assessed by studying the tolerance of developed models to systematic practical errors, as well as to the impact of an applied set of simplifying assumptions. The feasibility of the concept as well as its usefulness in accelerating the measurement process with respect to classical techniques were highlighted via numerical simulations. This thesis opens the door for exploiting echoes, generally regarded as a nuisance, in an antenna measurements context.

The wireless industry is such that suppliers of antennas have to adapt their designs to requirement changes over a period of just a few months. In these short design cycles time is crucial. Radiation pattern testing of the antennas at various points in this design cycle are nowadays mostly done using spherical near-field techniques, where the tangential electric field is acquired over an imaginary sphere close to, and surrounding, the antenna under test, and this data then transformed into a far-zone radiation pattern. There are some applications where acquisition over a rotationally symmetric surface other than a spherical one would not only reduce test times, but allow equipment cost reductions as well. However, near-field to far-field transformations for finite non-spherical measurement surface shapes are not available. Such a transformation is proposed, implemented and validated in this thesis. It uses the method of moments, customized to a rotationally symmetric surface (body of revolution) to effect this transformation.

No description available.

This thesis focuses on the application of electromagnetic inverse source techniques to characterize antennas using phaseless (amplitude-only) near-field (NF) measurement data. Removing the need to measure phase reduces the overall cost of the measurement apparatus since simple power meters can be used instead of expensive vector network analyzers. It has also been shown in the literature that a phaseless approach can improve the accuracy of the calculated far-field (FF) pattern in the presence of probe positioning errors compared to the amplitude-and-phase approach. A brief discussion on the state-of-the-art methods for characterizing antennas using phaseless near-field measurement data is presented. Two general approaches used most often to perform near-field to far-field (NF-FF) transformations, namely modal expansion and source reconstruction, are explained in detail for scenarios with and without phase information. A phaseless source reconstruction method (SRM) is the primary focus of this work. The SRM is an application of an electromagnetic inverse source technique and therefore, the complexities of solving the associated ill-posed inverse source problem are discussed. The application of the SRM to spherical and planar measurement geometries are presented along with the concerns regarding regularization resulting from discretizing the ill-posed system. A multiplicative regularization (MR) scheme originally developed for inverse scattering is adapted to suit the nonlinear cost functional for the phaseless planar measurement case and the mathematical framework is derived in detail. The resulting MR-SRM is fully automated and incorporates adaptive regularization. The developed algorithms are evaluated using several examples with synthetic phaseless NF data demonstrating the benefits and limitations of the source reconstruction method and the multiplicative regularization scheme. The application of the SRM to antenna diagnostics using phaseless NF data is also shown. Finally, the developed planar algorithms are tested with experimentally collected phaseless measurement data to demonstrate their potential as suitable antenna characterization techniques that can be of interest to the antenna measurement community. / October 2016

Photoconductive antenna (PCA) array based THz near-field imager incorporating Hadamard multiplexing method is developed in this work. By using a 2 × 2 dipole antenna array as the THz transmitter, the system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is demonstrated to be improved by a factor of 2 as the theory predicts. Additionally, a 2-D scanning of a metallic structure on a THz-transparent substrate (with a total scanning area of 1 × 1 mm2) is experimentally implemented. Correlation coefficient estimation is made afterwards to quantify the reconstructed image quality.

This thesis covers the development of the Reverberation Chamber as a measurement tool for cell phone tests in electronic production. It also covers the development of the Scattered Field Chamber as a measurement tool for simulations of real propagation environments. The first part is a more ”general knowledge about Reverberation Chambers”-part that covers some important phenomena like unstirred power and position dependence that might occour in a small Reverberation Chamber used for cell phone tests. Knowing how to deal with these phenomenas, give the possibility to use the chamber as a measurement tool for production tests even though it is too complex for a simple test of the antenna function. The second part shows how to alter some important propagation parameters inside the chamber to fit some real world propagation environments. The 3D plane wave distribution, the polarization and the amplitude statistics of the plane waves are all altered with simple techniques that are implementable all together. A small, shielded anechoic box with apertures is used to control 3D plane wave distribution and polarization. Antennas that introduce unstirred power in the chamber are used to control the statistics.

No description available.

No / Narrowband path loss measurements are reported for the vehicle-to-vehicle channel between a transmitting antenna 50 cm above the ground and a car-roof-mounted receiver array. Calibration procedures and measurement results are reported for typical urban, suburban and rural-motorway environments and compared with existing mobile channel models to give insight into the large-scale fading behavior in the vehicle-to-vehicle channel.

La thèse porte sur la génération de fronts d’ondes de test en milieu réverbérant pour la mesure d’antennes Ultra Large Bande. L’objectif est de générer des fronts d’ondes déterministes convergents, respectant les standards de mesure d'antennes, dans un milieu diffusif caractérisé par une décohérence spatiale, temporelle et fréquentielle. Les performances intéressantes, visées pour l’application, sont la génération temps réel, l’utilisation d’un nombre limité de sources et l’obtention d’un rendement de conversion d’énergie élevé. Tout d’abord, nous présentons des concepts de mesure d’antennes et montrons, les limites des méthodes actuelles pour la réalisation de caractérisations rapides permettant un niveau de rapport signal à bruit satisfaisant et n'utilisant pas de sources multiples. Puis, nous introduisons notre moyen d’essai, le système Time reversal Electromagnetic Chamber (TREC), constitué notamment d’une chambre réverbérante, dans laquelle un principe non standard de retournement temporel est utilisé pour générer des fronts d’ondes cohérents et convergents d’espace libre. Nous cherchons alors à étendre les capacités de la TREC à la génération des fronts d’ondes de test convergents et localement plans. Dans une phase d'étude préalable, nous développons deux approches pour synthétiser la propagation en espace libre des fronts d’ondes de mesure. Les techniques utilisées reposent sur l’utilisation de l’opérateur Slepian, permettant la résolution des contraintes imposées par les propriétés spécifiques des distributions de champ. La solution optimale de caractérisation a permis de générer des fronts d'ondes comportant une résolution angulaire. La synthèse des fronts d'ondes de test est utilisée dans des simulations électromagnétiques de TREC 2D et 3D. Les résultats ont validé la faisabilité de la génération de fronts d’ondes convergents, localement plans et résolus angulairement. / This contribution corresponds to the generation of test wavefronts in reverberation chamber for antenna Ultra Wide Band characterization. We were interested in generating deterministic convergent wavefronts, fulfilling the antenna measurement standard, in a diffusive medium characterized by a spatial, temporal and frequency decoherence. The interesting performances referred to the application, are the real-time synthesis, the use of a limited number of sources and the high energy conversion efficiency. First we present the concepts of antenna measurement and the limitations of current methods for achieving quick characterization with a sufficient signal to noise ratio without multiple sources. Then, we introduce our system, the Time Reversal Electromagnetic Chamber (TREC), which is mainly constituted by a reverberation chamber, in which a non-standard time reversal principle is used for coherent convergent free space wavefronts generation. Then we try to extend the TREC capacities to the generation of free space convergent and locally plan wavefronts. In a preliminary study, we develop two approaches to synthesize the free space propagation of the wavefronts. The used techniques are based on the utilization of the operator Slepian, allowing the resolution of the constraints determined by the specific properties of the field distribution. The optimal solution allowed generating wavefronts characterized by angular resolution. Test wavefronts synthesis is used in 2D and 3D TREC electromagnetic simulations. Results validated the feasibility of the generation of locally plan convergent wavefronts with angular resolution.

Antenna is an indispensable part of a radar or free space communication system. Antenna requires different stringent specifications for different applications. Designed and fabricated for an intended application, antenna or antenna array has to be evaluated for its far-field characteristics in real free space environment which requires setting up of far-field test site. Maintenance of the site to keep the stray reflections levels low, the cost of the real estate are some of the disadvantages. Nearfield measurements are compact and can be used to test the antennas by exploiting the relationship between near-field and far-field. It is shown that the far-field patterns of an antenna can be sufficiently accurately predicted provided the near-field measurements are accurate. Due to limitation in the near-field measurement systems, errors creep in corrupting the nearfield-measured data thus making error in prediction of the far field. All these errors ultimately corrupt the phase and amplitude data. In this thesis, one such near-field measurement facility, the Planar Near Field Measurement facility is discussed. The limitations of the facility and the errors that occur due to their limitations are discussed. Various errors that occur in measurements ultimately corrupt the near-field phase and amplitude. Investigations carried out aim at a detailed study of these phase and amplitude errors and their effect on the far-field patterns of the antenna. Depending on the source of error, the errors are classified as spike, pulse and random errors. The location of occurrence of these types of errors in the measurement plane, their effects on the far-field of the antenna is studied both for phase and amplitude errors. The studies conducted for various phase and amplitude errors show that the near-field phase and amplitude data are more tolerant to random errors as the far-field patterns do not get affected even for low sidelobe cases. The spike errors, though occur as a wedge at a single point in the measurement plane, have more pronounced effect on the far-field patterns. Lower the taper value of the antenna, more pronounced is the error. It is also noticed that the far-field pattern gets affected only in the plane where the error has occurred and has no effect in the orthogonal plane. Pulse type of errors which occur even for a short length in the measurement affect both the principle plane far-field patterns. This study can be used extensively as a tool to determine to the level to which various error such as mechanical, RF etc need to be controlled to make useful and correct pattern predictions on a particular facility. Thereby, the study can be used as a tool to economise the budget of the facility wherein the parameters required for building the facility need not be over specified beyond the requirement. In general, though this is a limited study, it is certainly a trendsetter in this direction.