On the Near-Field Sampling and Truncation Errors in Planar Time-Domain Near-Field to Far-Field Transformation

This paper studies the effect of three important parameters in planar time-domain (TD) near-field (NF) to far-field (FF) transformation. These parameters are the NF spatial sampling, NF measurement distance and scan surface truncation. The effect of these parameters over the TD FF accuracy are difficult to predict for Ultra Wide Band antennas. In this paper we aim to choose the optimum NF measurement parameters guaranteeing accurate calculation of the time-domain far-field. This allows the optimization of the computation time and memory requirements. Computations using analytic array of elementary dipoles radiation pattern are used to study the impact of each parameter in time-domain near-field antenna measurement. The comparison of the far-field results are presented in time and frequency domains. In particular, it is shown that the choice of the measurement distance and the size of the scan surface decide predominantly on the frequency band of accurate FF calculation. The used formalism in this paper for the NF to FF transformation is based on the Green’s function.