학술논문

Large Horizontal Near-Field Scanner Based on a Non-Tethered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Open Journal of Antennas and Propagation IEEE Open J. Antennas Propag. Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Open Journal of. 3:568-582 2022
Subject
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Aerospace
Antenna measurements
Autonomous aerial vehicles
Noise measurement
Arrays
Dipole antennas
Phase measurement
Receivers
near-field measurements
unmanned aerial vehicle
digital beamforming array
phased-array radio telescopes
array calibration
Language
ISSN
2637-6431
Abstract
A horizontal planar scanner with an approximate size of 40 m $\times40$ m has been implemented using the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology. The UAV is not wired to the ground to maintain the flexibility and short setup time of a non-tethered flight. In this configuration, the UAV-mounted continuous-wave source is not phase-locked to the on-the-ground receiver. A dual-polarized reference antenna placed on the ground is hence used to retrieve the relevant phase information. The presented approach has been applied on the Pre - Aperture Array Verification System (Pre -AAVS1) of the Square Kilometre Array, which is a digital beamformed array with 16 active elements. An inverse source technique has been applied on measured Near-Field (NF) data acquired on two different sets of points (one for each electric field component) from all the receiver channels. In this way, Embedded Element Patterns (EEPs), array calibration coefficients and pattern have been determined from NF data only. The achieved results have been validated using a complementary set of Far-Field (FF) measurements and simulations.