About measurements in reverberation chamber and isotropic reference environment

Paper in proceeding, 2010

The paper discusses the need for a reference environment for the characterization of small antennas intended to be used in multipath. The conclusion is that a good choice is the rich isotropic multipath environment as emulated by a well designed reverberation chamber, or possibly by a spherical array of antennas in an anechoic chamber. This is the only environment that enables a unique, objective and repeatable antenna characterization. This cannot be achieved in other environments. A few examples are given showing that the performances of different incremental antennas are very different and depend strongly on their orientations when they are located in a 2D horizontal multipath environment, with incident waves only in the horizontal plane, whereas their performances are equal and invariant to orientation when they are located in the rich isotropic multipath environment.