Design of a Multiprobe Planar Near-Field Scanner for Ku-Band

Demand for broadband connectivity in moving platforms on land, sea, and air has opened the mass market for low-cost mobile ground-station terminals that employ electrically steerable antennas. The antennas of these terminal units need to be tested in a production line environment. Planar near-field scanning is considered as a convenient measurement method, but the time needed for conventional scanning may be prohibitive. In this paper, the design of a multiprobe planar near-field scanner for rapid antenna testing at Ku-band is presented. A probe array is moved along a spiral path to avoid large accelerations and decelerations of the probe array, and the near-field sampling is done simultaneously with multiple of respective receivers. Thus, the data acquisition time is significantly reduced compared to the single probe or receiver measurement. A preliminary antenna test-system design for the mobile ground-station terminal antennas operating at Ku-band is presented. The numerical results for simple representative antenna models suggest good performance of the system.