Chapter 42 High Precision and Difference Measurement of Inter-element Amplitude and Phase Bias Errors Based on Channel Multiplexing

摘要

Modern satellite navigation system receiver use adaptive antenna array to suppress the RF interference and mitigate multipath signals in different directions from signals of interest. The inter-element amplitude and phase bias errors can cause performance degradation in the receiver. This paper presents a measurement with high precision in anechoic chamber, where channel multiplexing, difference measuring is used to decrease bias error caused by too many measuring data. And calibrating equation is put forward based on the three-dimensional rotating turntable, so that inter-element wave-way difference can be removed. Analyses show that the measuring precision can be increased by nearly double with low complexity and high efficiency. Then an automatic measuring system is designed, and data is measured by a multichannel vector network analyzer. A four elements array are measured, comparison between the measuring and simulating results demonstrates that the phase error is less than 8° while the efficiency is improved by nearly 4 times to conventional measurement.