Planar near-field antenna measurements with a uniform step larger than half-wavelength

Abstract: In this paper, a new sampling scheme of the near field radiated by a planar source is proposed and assessed. More in detail, the paper shows a uniform sampling criterion that allows representing the near field over a plane with a number of measurements lower than the classical half-wavelength sampling. At first, a discretization strategy of the near field based on the warping method is recalled from the literature. The latter requires to collect a non-redundant number of field measurements that are non-uniformly arranged over the observation domain. Despite this, the warping sampling scheme works well only if the measurement plane does not overcome the source. When the observation domain is larger, it does not predict the exact positions of the field samples at the edges of the measurement plane; accordingly, in these regions it is not possible to recover the near field behavior by the collected samples. To overcome this drawback, a spatially varying oversampling is exploited. The latter is chosen in such a way that the resulting sampling becomes uniform. Such choice also ensures a growth of the sampling rate only at the edges of the observation domain permitting the retrieval of the near field by its samples. Finally, numerical simulations based on experimental data corroborate the effectiveness of the approach in recovering both the near and the far field.