Identifying the Circular Polarization Handedness of an Antenna in a Reverberation Chamber

When an antenna is circularly (or elliptically) polarized, the axial ratio can be measured in a reverberation chamber (RC) by using the self-correlation of the radiation pattern of the antenna under test (AUT). However, the self-correlation method cannot identify the handedness (left- or right-handed polarization) of an antenna. In this communication, we propose a reference antenna method in an RC to solve this problem. Two reference antennas are used, which are left- and right-handed circularly polarized, respectively. By measuring the radiation pattern correlation between the AUT and the reference antennas, the handedness of the AUT can be identified. Interestingly, the results are based on statistics and the significance of the measurement results is self-explained. Measurements are performed to validate the proposed method.