Plane Wave Generator in Nonanechoic Radio Environment

Plane wave generator (PWG), which can approximate a far field testing condition within a given quiet zone at a smaller measurement distance compared with the traditional direct far field setup, has attracted great interest both from academia and industry in recent years for 5G antenna testing. State-of-art PWGs are typically designed and validated in a clean anechoic environment. However, typical PWG deployment scenarios might be compact and nonanechoic, which would lead to significant PWG performance deterioration. In this work, we propose to record the transfer matrix in a practical deployment setup and optimize the PWG weights based on the a priori measured transfer matrix. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed strategy is validated using a practical PWG in an anechoic and nonanechoic environment with the presence of a strong reflector.