Case study of sample spacing in planar near-field measurement of high gain antennas

Far field antenna patterns can be reconstructed from planar near field measurements acquired at a sample spacing of lambda/2 or less. For electrically large antennas, sampling at the Nyquist rate may result in errors due to system electronic drift over long acquisition times. The computer capacity may limit the largest size of the near field data set. The requirement to sample at the Nyquist rate is relaxed for high gain antennas which concentrate most of the radiated energy into a small angular region of the far field. The criteria for sample spacing at greater than lambda/e through the use of a priori information of the antenna radiation characteristics are presented. Far field patterns of a 30 GHz dual offset reflector system with a 2.7 m parabolic main reflector are computed from near field data obtained at sample spacings ranging from 0.1 lambda to 10 lambda. The effects of sampling interval and spectrum cutoff on the far field patterns are discussed