Multipath-Enhanced Measurement of Antenna Patterns: Theory

Traditional antenna pattern measurements involve minimizing the impact of multipath propagation in the measurement environment. In contrast, this work introduces a measurement approach that uses rather than mitigates multipath propagation. This is referred to as the Multipath-Enhanced Antenna Pattern (MEAP) Measurement technique. In this respect the approach has some kinship with Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) systems. The advantage in the case of MIMO systems is increased capacity; in the MEAP approach the advantage is elimination of the need for creating an anechoic environment. The approach uses measurements with reference antennas to calibrate the multipath channel matrix, and vector spherical harmonics for efficient pattern representation. After presenting the mathematical details of the method, numerical calculations illustrating the approach are presented. Experimental results are described in a companion paper.