Electrical alignment of antenna coordinate system in a planar near-field setup

In this paper, a simple and efficient electrical alignment procedure known as flip-test is adapted and applied to check and correct two errors in the mechanical setup of a planar near-field system: the mis-pointing of the z-axis of the antenna coordinate system with respect to the scan plane and the displacement of the center point of the scan plane with respect to the z-axis of the antenna coordinate system.

Simulations of the errors and their correction algorithms were carried out with different models of antennas composed of Hertzian dipoles and an optimum algorithm was then selected. The proposed procedure was tested on a planar near-field setup in C-band and the results show that it works in practice with the achieved residual uncertainty being of the order of tens of a millimeter and hundreds of a degree.