Investigation on Frequency Stirring in Reverberation Chamber

The radio frequency(RF) modes of reverberation chamber(RC) in different frequency ranges are calculated to develop frequency-stirring techniques for RCs. An experimental system is built with a two-port vector network analyzer, of which one port is connected to a transmitting antenna located in a corner of a RC, and the other port is connected to a receiving antenna located in the working area of the RC. The parameter S21 is obtained in eight different locations of the receiving antenna for discussing the number of RF modes and the stirring bandwidth. It is found that the lowest useable frequency of a RC is determined by the RC's dimension: the larger the dimension is,the lower the lowest useable frequency is. S21 at the lowest useable frequency is about-20 dB, and it is more stable than that at lower frequencies when the frequency increases. Increasing the bandwidth would result in a smoother dependence of S21 on frequency, which shows that frequency stirring is effective. In a RC with frequency stirring, the standard deviations of three individual field components and the total field are within the specified tolerance, i.e. the electric field distribution is uniform. Meanwhile, the electric field's magnitude is characterized by the Chi-distribution with two degrees of freedom or the Rayleigh distribution, and the square of the magnitude is characterized by the Chi-square distribution with two degrees of freedom or the exponential distribution. Therefore, both good uniformity and good behavior of the electric field can be obtained if the RF modes in the RC are sufficient.