Use of Compressive Sensing Techniques for the Rapid Production Test of Commercial Nose-Mounted Radomes in a Robotic Antenna Measurement System

The recent trend towards implementing antenna measurement ranges employing multi-axis industrial robotic positioners that provide a near limitless degree of flexibility in terms of measurement types and scan geometries admits possibilities that go far beyond the requirements of classical antenna measurement systems or perhaps even beyond the expectations of those who originally conceived of the system. One recent example involves the use of a dual robotic antenna measurement system for the near-field test and measurement of commercial nose-mounted radomes. Such measurements typically involve extended measurement times due to the need to acquire two-dimensional near-field data to obtain the asymptotic far-fields. This paper introduces a new approach for the production test and verification of commercial nose-mounted radomes that uses a total difference based, sparse sampling technique that aims to accelerate the measurement process to drastically cut the requisite test time. The new algorithm is introduced, simulated results are presented, where it is demonstrated that far-field results with an equivalent multipath level of better than -60dB can be obtained from as few as 1 to 2% of the points required by a classical Nyquist spherical near-field acquisition scheme.