Thermal Antenna Testing

Thermal Antenna Testing

Our Anechoic Thermal Chamber

ATL is proud to be the first lab offering controlled temperature far field antenna testing. We can fully evaluate your antennas for gain/phase/efficiency patterns over the extended +25 to +125 degrees C range.

While we don’t heat the entire anechoic chamber, we have developed a thin film fluoropolymer Teflon high temperature envelope that’s only 0.002″ thick. Practically invisible to RF! Then using 1.5 kW of heated pressurized air to inflate the bag, we tightly PID control your antenna’s ambient air temperature. We even provide a detailed temperature log/graph recorded during your evaluation. This virtual anechoic thermal chamber allows many real-world effects to be studied, especially important on controlled permittivity/permeability substrates that can experience significant thermal degradation. For example, notice the considerable drop in gain for this simple PCB quad patch array antenna at 5.8 GHz. Its gain is degraded by 3 dB over temperature !

Now you can actually validate your antenna’s important parameters such as gain, efficiency, beamwidth, axial ratio, etc., over it’s full operating temperature range. No longer do you have to make due with just VSWR measurements in a thermal chamber and hope that far-field performance is in spec.