Measurement Uncertainty in the Reverberation Chamber

Due to the complicated and time-varying test conditions, reverberation chamber (RC) measurement data are usually analysed from a statistical point of view. This chapter investigates the measurement uncertainty in the RC. The measurement uncertainty can be assessed by repeating the reference measurement several times with different positions and orientations of the reference antenna inside the RC. According to the statistics, the RC measurement uncertainty depends on its independent sample numbers. The chapter describes the autocorrelation function (ACF) method and spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) method for estimating the number of independent samples. The uncertainty models using the ACF method or DoF method relies on accurate estimation of the number of independent samples. For the sake of completeness and to facilitate the uncertainty analysis, the chapter briefly repeats the standard method for antenna efficiency measurement with slightly different notations.