Full Polarimetric Modeling of the Reconfigurable Over-The-Air Chamber

The reconfigurable over-the-air chamber (ROTAC) is a reverberation chamber, used for over-the-air testing of mobile devices, whose walls are lined with antennas. By changing the sources or impedances attached to these antennas, the ROTAC can control the relative chamber mode weighting and therefore the field incident on the device under test with much more precision than is possible using traditional mechanical mode stirring. Recent moment method modeling has provided a tool for ROTAC design and characterization, but the results have been limited to exploring a single polarization in the chamber and having antennas on a single wall. This paper reports on an extension of this modeling to multiple polarizations and antennas on any walls. The model is used to explore plane wave synthesis in the chamber, with the results revealing that synthesizing a field with polarization purity requires additional chamber resources compared to the case that ignores the presence of cross-polarized fields.