Atmospheric Attenuation in a mmWave Reverberation Chamber

This letter describes the effects of atmospheric attenuation on reverberation-chamber measurements in the mmWave range. It is evaluated using chamber-decay time, as the atmospheric attenuation is also defined as the rate of decay. We describe a method to de-embed atmospheric attenuation to evaluate for which cases it has a measurable impact and show results from 50 to 140 GHz, including uncertainty. We report a measurable impact in the used chamber when the attenuation is approximately 2 dB/km. We report this effect to show that the chamber loss can be dominated by atmospheric attenuation at higher frequencies. This can lead to increased measurement uncertainty or can make reverberation-chamber measurements highly impractical in a similar setting. With a climate-controlled environment, this can potentially be overcome.