Antenna Measurement Software

The software used to control the measurement ranges is common to both CATR and Anechoic Chamber. The package, written in Rocky Mountain Basic at Queen Mary, is fully menu driven making extensive use of softkeys to provide user friendly operation.

A measurement procedure, which is used to describe how the measurement is to be performed, can be easily set up and stored on disk so that repeating a complete measurement can be performed simply by loading the relevant measurement procedure file. A measurement procedure file contains such information as:

• will the pattern cuts be specified of equally spaced from a start and stop angle;
• is the cut a co-polar or x-polar pattern;
• are spot frequencies to be used or a frequency scan from specified start and stop values to be used.

The use of Basic and structured programming means that modifications to the software can be made quite rapidly.

Radiation pattern data can be plotted directly after each pattern cut is taken or stored on disk for later display and/or transfered via FTP to another site. A separate display program (also fully menu driven and written in Basic) can take a series of pattern cuts stepped in polarisation angle and created in the anechoic chamber and display them as false colour contour plots, false colour isometric plots, or colour wire isometric plots. The same can be done for for a series of azimuth cuts stepped in elevation taken on the mmCATR. In both cases colour plots can be printed out on a Hewlett Packard PaintJet printer or a Mac via Mathematica.