Applying Time Gating and Stirring for Radiation Pattern Measurements in a Reverberation Chamber

This paper applies both stirring and time gating to measure the radiation pattern of antennas in a reverberation chamber. Time gating in highly reflective environments requires a large bandwidth but has a similar measurement time compared to measurements performed in an anechoic chamber. Mechanical stirring itself fails to isolate the line-of-sight path from the unstirred non-line-of-sight signal. This method requires a long measurement time but could be performed at a single frequency. This work shows that by combining mechanical stirring and frequency stirring over a small bandwidth, the unwanted effects of the non-line-of-sight unstirred components can be reduced while having a negligible impact on the measurement time. This work applies stirring and time gating to measure the radiation pattern in the E-plane of a standard gain horn antenna at the Ka-band. The radiation patterns are compared to full-wave simulations performed in CST and shown at 28 and 35 GHz.