Study On Mid-field Calibrating Technique Of Phased Array Antenna And Its Engineeringapplications

In this paper, we present a new phased array antenna calibrating technique-Mid-field Calibrating Technique (MFCT). The MFCT base on the mutual coupling technique (MCT) of active phased array antenna calibration. The main idea of the MFCT is to test transmitting signals of each array element by a reference antenna locates on two or three fixed positions in front of the test array respectively. This test method avoids calculating or testing the beams of both reference antenna and array elements, and the exact distances between the reference antenna and the array elements are no need to be measured. We build a test system applied in a low sidelobe phased array. The calibrating parameters be obtained by the data processing method of the MFCT. The calibrating results using the MFCT close to the results using near field.Based on the MFCT, we first provided a one-dimension test system for watching radar. The system was applied in antenna beam testing or distributions calibrating. Second, we completed a two-dimension test system scheme for an active phased array antenna. Third, we discussed the subarea test method that will apply in an satellite active phased array composed of subarrays.The MFCT has more applications than the MCT, and it is cheap and convenience for engineering applications.