Experimental Field Reconstruction of Incoherent Sources

The problem of characterizing random sources from near-field measurements and of devising the random field sampling procedure is tackled by a stochastic approach. The presented technique is an extension of that introduced in [22] and successfully adopted to experimentally characterize deterministic (CW and multi-frequency) radiators and fields. Under the assumption that the source is wide sense stationary, quasi-monochromatic and incoherent, its intensity is reconstructed by time-domain field measurements aimed at extracting information from the mutual coherence of the acquired near-field. The linear relation between the field coherence and the source intensity is inverted by using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) approach, properly representing the source intensity distribution by exploiting the a priori information (e.g., its size and shape) on the radiator. The sampling of the radiated random field is devised by a singular value optimization procedure of the relevant finite dimensional linear operator. Experimental results using a slotted reverberation chamber as incoherent source assess the performance of the approach.