Near-field warping sampling scheme for broad-side antenna characterization

In this paper the problem of sampling the field radiated by a planar source observed over a finite planar aperture located in the near-field is addressed. The problem is cast as the determination of the spatial measurement positions which allow us to discretize the radiation problem so that the singular values of the radiation operator are well-approximated. More in detail, thanks to a suitably warping transformation of the observation variables, the kernel function of the relevant operator is approximated by a band-limited function and hence the sampling theorem applied to achieved discretization. It results in the sampling points having to be non-linearity arranged across the measurement aperture and their number can be considerably lowered as compared to more standard sampling approach. It is shown that the proposed sampling scheme works well for measurement apertures that are not too large as compared to the source’s size. As a consequence, the method appears better suited for broad-side large antenna whose radiated field is mainly concentrated in front of the antenna. A numerical analysis is included to check the theoretical findings and to study the trade-off between the field accuracy representation (over the measurement aperture) and the truncation error in the estimated far-field radiation pattern.