Improving the working volume by a high-efficiency antenna array in a reverberation chamber for 5G testing

Reverberation chamber (RC) has been widely used in the over-the-air (OTA) testing. However, the conventional metal mechanical stirrer used in RC occupies a large space. As expecting to be at least lambda/4$$ \boldsymbol{\lambda} /\mathbf{4} $$ to the mechanical stirrer and boundary of the RC, the working volume is affected by the volume of the stirrer. To improve the working volume of the RC, we proposed an antenna array consist of 16 monopoles asymmetric distributed on a dielectric substrate as the mechanical stirrer, which works at 5G (WLAN) frequency band. The measurement results are compared to the metal mechanical stirrer, which show that the antenna array improves the working volume and stir efficiency significantly in RC.