Low Scattering Plane Wave Generator Design Using a Novel Non-coplanar Structure for Near-Field Over-the-air Testing

Plane Wave Generator (PWG) has recently attracted great attention from industry and academia for over-the-air (OTA) testing of base station (BS) antennas in the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication systems. This paper aims to reduce the scattering from the PWG to the antenna under test (AUT), which might be problematic in the near-field OTA testing. First, we introduce a low monostatic radar cross section (RCS) PWG array element design. The PWG is also loaded with pyramidal microwave absorbing material (MAM) to suppress the multi-reflections between the AUT and the PWG. Furthermore, unlike coplanar PWG design generally reported in the literature, a novel non-coplanar design is proposed to realize the destructive interference of the scattered signals from the PWG, thereby significantly reducing the multiple reflections. PWG elements in the non-coplanar design are placed in the propagation direction according to planar and non-planar field distribution on the PWG radiated from the BS AUT. To validate our proposed design, a 4×4 PWG array with a 108 mm element spacing and a non-coplanar structure is developed and experimentally validated. The measured results show that the second incident wave of the proposed non-coplanar PWG array structure based on non-planar field distribution is 7.9 dB lower than that of the classical coplanar PWG design from 2.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz, and 1.9 dB lower than that of the proposed non-coplanar PWG array structure based on planar field distribution, which demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed design.