Abstract —This paper presents a low cost automatic system forsampling the electric field in a limited area. The scanning area is aflat surface parallel to the ground at a selected height. We discussin detail the hardware, software and all the arrangements involvedin the system operation. In order to show the system performancewe include a campaign of narrow band measurements with 6017sample points in the surroundings of a cellular base station. Acommercial isotropic antenna with three orthogonal axes was usedas sampling device. The results are analyzed in terms of its spaceaverage, standard deviation and statistical distribution. Keywords —measurement device, propagation, spatial sampling. I. I NTRODUCTION T HE spatial distribution of the electric field in urban areasis a key issue in many fields of electrical engineering.Specifically, propagation models are considered for analyzingthe wireless communication channel in order to achieve aperformance improvement. On the other hand there also existsome concerns about environmental electric and magneticfields level control and safety guideline compliance. In thissense, measurement campaigns are carried out for guidelinecompliance assessment purposes.It is not easy to evaluate the spatial variability of the electricfield strength by moving a probe along the measurementplane or volume doing it by hand. For example, widebandmeasurement systems are especially sensitive to movement. Inaddition, it is known that there are perturbations of the fieldsbeing measured due to the presence of the human body [1].Given that, if we want to characterize the field in a limitedarea at some level of detail, we need some automatic systemto perform the spatial sampling process by carrying the probealong selected lines that contains the spatial sampling points.At these fixed locations the vehicle that carries the probe stopsand performs the measurement process. This scanning devicecould also choose the next sampling point according to the datarecorded in previous steps to decide whether undersample oroversample the next spatial segment.In this paper we present a low cost spatial scanning devicethat could be useful for experimental studies. Actually we areemploying it to corroborate propagation models, to design
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