Probe Antenna

In antenna field measurements, the radiated field is usually measured with a so called probe antenna. In general, the measured signal depends on

• the electromagnetic field incident on the probe antenna (i.e., usually the field of interest that is to be measured)
• the receive behaviour of the probe antenna (i.e., a weighting of the incident fields specific to the probe antenna).

Accounting for the probe specific receive behavior in an antenna field measurement is called "probe correction".

While the electromagnetic field is generally modelled by an AntennaFieldRepresentation, the receive behaviour of a probe antenna is provided by the type ProbeAntenna. For reciprocal antennas^[1], the receive behaviour of an antenna is completely characterized by the radiation behavior of the antenna. Therefore, any Radiated type of AntennaFieldRepresentation can be used for defining the relevant properties of a ProbeAntenna. In fact, in AntennaFieldrepresentations.jl, the ProbeAntenna type is merely a thin wrapper around any AntennaFieldRepresentation{Radiated} (supplemented by the information of the probe antenna size).

A ProbeAntenna object can be generated by the constructor

ProbeAntenna(aut_field::AntennaFieldRepresentation{Radiated}, size::Real)

where

• aut_field <: AntennaFieldRepresentation{Radiated, C<: ComplexF64} may be any AntennaFieldRepresentation of radiating type
• size <: Real is a real number denotig the physical size of the probe antenna in terms of the radius of the smallest sphere enclosing the complete probe antenna.