Frequency Stirring Effects on Reference Antenna Efficiency Measurements in Reverberation Chambers

The reverberation chamber (RC) has been proven to be a powerful technique to determine the antenna efficiency. This letter focuses on the RC-based reference antenna method (RAM). Since the broadband wireless channel within the RC is frequency selective, the statistical behavior of the RAM in cases of frequency stirring (FS) is different from the other cases. However, the differences caused by the FS effects have been overlooked in the existing literatures. In this work, a statistical model of the RAM involving with FS is established and verified by measurements. It is found that the proposed model provides an accurate estimation of the statistics of the RAM regardless of the FS bandwidth, indicating that the FS effects are fully considered. The findings of this work not only provide rigorous analyses of the statistics of the RAM but also allow accurate determinations of FS parameters.