Spherical Phaseless Probe-Corrected Near-Field Measurements of the DTU-ESA VAST12 Reflector Antenna

An experimental case of spherical probe-corrected phaseless near-field measurements with the two-scans technique is presented, based on magnitude measurements at two surfaces of the VAST12 reflector antenna performed at the DTU-ESA Facility. Phase retrieval using strictly the directly measured near-field magnitude was unfeasible in this setup, due to the small sphere separation allowed by the probe positioner, which led to incorrect and excessively slow convergence.

Phase retrieval with larger separation between spheres has shown remarkable results. For these tests a measured magnitude was used in combination with calculated near-field magnitudes at different (larger and smaller) spheres with larger separations than allowed by the experimental setup. It has been seen that larger separation between measurement spheres improves accuracy of phase retrieval.

A measurement with a backprojected measurement with 3m sphere separation is of particular interest because it can be potentially replicated in the DTU-ESA Facility assuming such range of movement was allowed, while being accurate down to an error of less than -35dB. Measurements with larger spheres show even better accuracy.

These good results were obtained with the normal spatial sampling rate for complex measurements and with a very simple Hertzian dipole initial guess, and show the superior performance of spherical phaseless measurements with the two-scans technique, compared to a planar setup.