Antenna measurement system verification by correlation with facility-comparison campaign in the framework of the European association of antennas and propagation

Facility-comparison campaigns are an important on-going activity in the frame of the EurAPP working group on antennas measurements [1]. This work comes from the experience acquired during the VI EU Framework network “Antenna Centre of Excellence (ACE)” [2] as reported in [3-9]. During that project, the different facility comparison activities spanned the range from L-Ka band using different highly stable antennas. The vast amount of data from different measurements institutions within Europe and US were used to establish a reference pattern for each of the high accuracy reference antennas. The reference patterns and the data from the facility comparison activities are considered important instruments to verify the measurements accuracies for antenna measurement ranges as well as to investigate and evaluate possible improvements in measurement set-ups and procedures. In this paper, we report on a system verification and validation activity performed with the SATIMO BTS1940-04 antenna and compare the results to the the highly accurate EurAPP reference pattern of the similar antenna SATIMO BTS1940-01. Future activities include the measurement of the antenna used in the EurAAP activity for more accurate comparison.

1. Introduction

Recently, the primary part of the EurAAP intercomparison campaign involving the SATIMO BTS1940–01 antenna has been completed. The antenna has been measured in different reference facilities and a highly accurate reference pattern has been determined [2].