A spherical near-field antenna measurement facility employing a time domain hardware gating technique is presented. On-off keyed sinusoidal impulses are used as stimuli requiring wideband antennas with a bandwidth in excess of 400 MHz. The received signal is evaluated in the time interval after reaching the steady state and before multipath components arising in the non-ideal anechoic chamber distort the signal.

An application specific pulse generator synthesizing sinusoidal impulses with a sub-nanosecond settling time and a low-cost equivalent time (ET) sampling receiver developed and optimized for this particular purpose are described.

Measurement results of typical ultra-wideband (UWB) antennas show a significant improvement of the measured antenna pattern compared to conventional techniques.