Fast measurement technique for phased array calibration

A novel measurement method is proposed in order to measure the active electric fields of the individual antenna elements in a phased array antenna. Fast and accurate measurements can be realized by the proposed method because the electric fields of multiple elements can be obtained simultaneously and no phase measurements are required. Hence, it can be easily applied to the on-board diagnostics and re-calibration in the operating phased array antenna systems. In the first step with this method, the phases of multiple antenna elements are successively shifted with the specified phase intervals while the array power variations are measured. Next, the measured power variation is expanded into a Fourier series and the terms are rearranged to put them into the form of the rotating element electric field vector (REV) method. Finally, the REV solution is used to identify the electric fields of the individual elements. Additionally, a theoretical study is carried out on the accuracy of the proposed measurement method. Simple, closed-form equations have been successfully derived for the measurement errors and the calibration accuracy is theoretically estimated. The proposed measurement method is validated with experimental results and the measurement accuracy is compared with the theoretical prediction.