Methodology for Assessing Antenna Performance.

摘要

Prior to widespread use of adaptive, multiple-beam, etc., antennas in communication and radar systems, most antenna systems were relatively simple devices. Their performance could be accurately assessed by the measured antenna gain, principal plane sidelobe level, radiation impedance, and far zone polarization. In contrast, current day antenna systems can be so complex that human ability to study the measured performance data is not adequate to determine, in an objective manner, which of more than one antenna designs is superior. In addition, the large amount of data, required to assess the antenna's performance properly, is not usually put in a form suitable for appropriate assessment. in particular, visual inspection of a large number of antenna radiation pattern contour plots is realistically beyond any human's ability to quantitatively determine good performance from inadequate performance. Clearly, today's sophisticated antenna systems require more than an adequate specification of the important performance characteristics. It is necessary to have a suitable figure of merit (FOM) that is capable of yielding an unbiased measure of the antenna systems many performance characteristics combined to yield a direct measure of their effect on the communication or radar system with which the antenna is designed to operate. This paper is addressed to the definition of such an FOM and the demonstration of its use in comparing the performance of two arbitrarily selected adaptive antennas. (Author)