VNIIFTRI is building a new, unique radio engineering test facility

Moscow Region, September 7 – VNIIFTRI is completing the installation of measuring equipment at a new RF shielded anechoic chamber it is constructing in its territory. The new test facility is designed for high-precision antenna measurements in the range of up to millimeter wavelengths and will enable VNIIFTRI to perform calibration and adjustment of current, and future, state-of-the-art antenna systems commonly used in the aerospace industry, radio navigation, radio astronomy, radar and telecommunications (NGN).

“VNIIFTRI already has in place an anechoic chamber functioning as a test facility for consumer navigation equipment. The new chamber has broadened measurement capabilities concentrated in a single test facility. This makes it unique in world practice. And the methods and hardware solutions implemented will allow it to surpass most of its existing partial analogs in measurement accuracy,” said VNIIFTRI’s General Director Sergey Donchenko.

The capabilities of the new chamber will permit measurement of the characteristics of antennas and antenna arrays with large apertures. For this end, the test facility will employ three measuring stands with different principles of generation of electromagnetic fields: a spherical field in the intermediate and far field regions; a plane field produced by a radio collimator; and a plane field reconstructed from the near field region.

The list of measured characteristics includes directional properties (tridimensional amplitude patterns, phase and polarization characteristics) as well as energy characteristics (antenna gain, effective isotropically radiated power, figure of merit). When developing the facility, special attention was given to the possibility of testing new generation active phased and digital antenna arrays.

It should be particularly noted that domestically produced devices and materials were mainly used in building the facility, and these in terms of their properties correspond to the best foreign analogs. The entire software and mathematical support necessary for the measurements and analysis of measurement results was developed by VNIIFTRI specialists.

The completion of the testing and the putting into operation of the new test facility are scheduled for the end of 2022.