Fast near-field far-field transformation for phaseless and irregular antenna measurement data

Abstract. The characterization of antenna radiation patterns by transformed near-field measurements requires accurate amplitude and phase data. This represents a problem since expensive measurement equipment is required, especially at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths (Isernia et al., 1996). Amplitude-only antenna field measurements are theoretically sufficient for the unique determination of antenna far-fields. Therefore, phaseless techniques are of special interest. However, the required field transformations are extremely challenging, since they are nonlinear and strongly ill-posed.

In this work, the amplitude-only or phaseless near-field far-field transformation problem is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem. The linear radiation operator within the nonlinear formulation is evaluated using the fast irregular antenna field transformation algorithm (FIAFTA). A hybrid solution procedure is described which combines a genetic algorithm with an iterative conjugate gradient (CG) search method. Numerical results prove the efficiency and flexibility of the formulation and it is shown that the algorithm remains stable when the noise level in the measurements is moderate. Nevertheless, regularization techniques might be beneficial to further improve the robustness of the algorithm.