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Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV

On-site antenna measurement has been recently attracting an increasing interest in order to assess the antenna performance in real operational environments. The complexity and cost of these kind of measurements have been significantly cut down due to recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles’...

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Autores principales: García Fernández, María, Álvarez López, Yuri, Las-Heras, Fernando
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6864538/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31717861
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19214663
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author García Fernández, María
Álvarez López, Yuri
Las-Heras, Fernando
author_facet García Fernández, María
Álvarez López, Yuri
Las-Heras, Fernando
author_sort García Fernández, María
collection PubMed
description On-site antenna measurement has been recently attracting an increasing interest in order to assess the antenna performance in real operational environments. The complexity and cost of these kind of measurements have been significantly cut down due to recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs) hardware and antenna measurement post-processing techniques. In particular, the introduction of positioning and geo-referring subsystems capable of providing centimeter-level accuracy together with the use of phase retrieval techniques and near-field to far-field transformation algorithms, have enabled near field measurements using UAVs. This contribution presents an improved UAV-based on-site antenna measurement system. On the one hand, the simultaneous acquisition on two measurement surfaces has been introduced and calibrated properly, thus reducing geo-referring uncertainties and flight time. On the other hand, the positioning and geo-referring subsystem has been enhanced by means of a dual-band real time kinematics (RTK) unit. The system capabilities were validated by measuring an offset reflector antenna, and the results were compared with the measurements at the spherical range in the anechoic chamber and with the measurements collected with a previous version of the implemented system.
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spelling pubmed-68645382019-12-23 Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV García Fernández, María Álvarez López, Yuri Las-Heras, Fernando Sensors (Basel) Article On-site antenna measurement has been recently attracting an increasing interest in order to assess the antenna performance in real operational environments. The complexity and cost of these kind of measurements have been significantly cut down due to recent developments in unmanned aerial vehicles’ (UAVs) hardware and antenna measurement post-processing techniques. In particular, the introduction of positioning and geo-referring subsystems capable of providing centimeter-level accuracy together with the use of phase retrieval techniques and near-field to far-field transformation algorithms, have enabled near field measurements using UAVs. This contribution presents an improved UAV-based on-site antenna measurement system. On the one hand, the simultaneous acquisition on two measurement surfaces has been introduced and calibrated properly, thus reducing geo-referring uncertainties and flight time. On the other hand, the positioning and geo-referring subsystem has been enhanced by means of a dual-band real time kinematics (RTK) unit. The system capabilities were validated by measuring an offset reflector antenna, and the results were compared with the measurements at the spherical range in the anechoic chamber and with the measurements collected with a previous version of the implemented system. MDPI 2019-10-27 /pmc/articles/PMC6864538/ /pubmed/31717861 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19214663 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
García Fernández, María
Álvarez López, Yuri
Las-Heras, Fernando
Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV
title Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV
title_full Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV
title_fullStr Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV
title_full_unstemmed Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV
title_short Dual-Probe Near-Field Phaseless Antenna Measurement System on Board a UAV
title_sort dual-probe near-field phaseless antenna measurement system on board a uav
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6864538/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31717861
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19214663
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