Multipath-Enhanced Measurement of Antenna Patterns: Experiment

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates a multipath-based antenna pattern measurement technique in a home garage, showing that it can effectively determine antenna patterns using multiple sensing methods and constraints.

Contribution

The paper validates a multipath-based antenna measurement method through experimental results, comparing different analysis techniques for improved accuracy.

Findings

Constrained least-square-error method yields the best measurement accuracy.

Using 10 sense antennas improves the measurement quality.

The technique is feasible in typical indoor environments.

Abstract

In a companion paper we presented the theory for an antenna pattern measuring technique that uses (rather than mitigates) the properties of a multipath environment. Here we use measurements in a typical home garage to experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of the technique. A half-wavelength electric dipole with different orientations was used as both the calibration and test antennas. For simplicity, we limited the modeling of the antenna pattern to using only the three $l=1$ vector spherical harmonics. Three methods were used to analyze the measurements: a matrix inversion method using only 3 sense antennas, a least-square-error technique, and a least-square-error technique with a constant power constraint imposed. The two least-square-error techniques used the measurements from 10 sense antennas. The constrained least-square-error technique was found to give the best results.