Measuring your antenna’s radiation pattern with a drone

Article excerpt

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV / drones) systems offer a flexible, cost-effective alternative to traditional, expensive indoor chambers for testing large, installed antennas in their operational environments. Researchers developed a specialized, heat-resistant hexacopter with high-precision, sub-centimeter GPS tracking to collect antenna data, even in harsh conditions. To process the resulting irregular data, the team created the ASPIRE software pipeline, which uses advanced, sparse-recovery algorithms to convert complex, real-world measurements into accurate, far-field radiation patterns. This system demonstrated high accuracy, matching professional testing facilities within a 0.4° beamwidth margin at 6.7 GHz, and the study provides a full, open-source guide for both the drone hardware an