System Design for a Compact Antenna and RCS Test Range

Projecte final de carrera relaitzat en col.laboració amb Institute of High Frequency Technology (IHF)The purpose of this master thesis was to determine the fundamental design features of the subsystems that conform a Compact Antenna and RCS Test Range. The major part of this work focused on evaluation and investigation regarding the RF Instrumentation subsystem possibilities of the future measurement range. Since one of the parameters that have more impact on the performance of the future range is the Measurement Dynamic Range, e.g. in order to deal with sidelobesupression generated in this kind of ranges, the goal of the project focused on conceiving a procedure to obtain a reliable Dynamic Range estimation once the antenna range instrumentation characteristics are known. In addition, comparisons of different RF instrumentation layout options are presented, including not only performance in terms of Dynamic Range; but also in terms of optimal settings for each component configuring the RF Instrumentation subsystem. This circumstance led not only to results regarding performance confrontation between different instrumentation geometries and components, but also to the development of a software tool able to calculate and evaluate the previous characteristics mentioned. This document will describe the procedure to evaluate compact range RF system performance in terms of Dynamic Range. Afterwards, the results obtained through analysis of concrete layouts options will be presented and an introduction to the developed software calculation tool will be exposed