Post-processing tool for antenna measurement/ IE3D

Hi everyone,
I am searching a free post-processing tool for antenna measurement.
In fact, i have a four access antenna for circular polarisation. The measurement of this antenna is achieved with only one port at the same time. Therefore, I need to reconstitute the total pattern of the antenna (in RHCP or LHCP) using the four port patterns (in E-phi et E-Theta).
However, does IE3D do it?

Thanks in advance,
S@mi

Hi, sami273:

I may be able to help you. However, I may not understand you completely. It seems to me you have a 4-port antenna. However, you get the 4 patterns, each with 1-port excited. You want to see the total pattern RHCP or LHCP.

The things I am not very clear is that when 1-port is excited, what are the status of the other ports? In order to combine them, you will need to know what the status of the other ports when 1-port is excited.

Please post your answes here or you can contact me at jian@zeland.com. Regards.

Hi jian,
thank you for your reply,
Yes, i have a 4 port antenna and in measurment i get 4 patterns( E-phi and E-theta), each with 1 port excited and others (the three ports remain) are loaded by Zc (50 Ohm in my case).
I want to calculate the total pattern RHCP or LHCP of the 4 port antenna.
I hope that's more clear for you.

regards,
Sami

Hi, Sami273:

IE3D's PATTERNVIEW has a feature called Merge Pattern. It should achieve what you want. You can merge your 4-patterns into one. Then, you can adjust the excitations' magnitude and phase for what you want. For your case, you only need to adjust the phase.

Best regards,

Hi jian,
i already know this feature of IE3D, but I use experimental datas from measurement( E-phi and E-theta for each port under sheet format). How can I convert results that I have so that I can manipulate under IE3D (file *.pat) ?

Regards,
Sami

Hi, Sami273:

The .pat file format is documented in the IE3D 11 User's Manual. There is a lot of data involved. You can try to see whether you can fit your measured data into it. The most important ones are:

1. Port information. It is the state of the antenna with the excitations of all the ports.
2. The normalized pattern data and the magnitude of the pattern. The file contains a list of E-theta and E-phi. However, they are normalized. There is a magnitude value stored in the file.

There are other values such as gain, directivity etc. Those are not critical. They are re-calculated from the pattern and port data. If you try to fit your measured data into it, you can put any values in those fields. Also, your antenna has 4 ports, you can fit all your data into one file with 4 excitations.

Best regards,

Thanks jian, I will try to do it.