Reducing the complexity of near-field scanning of stochastic fields

Near-field scanning is an established technique for the efficient and accurate measurement of the radiated emissions from antenna or electronic equipment for EMC studies. Recently the use of two probes near-field scanning of the correlation of the radiated fields has been developed for the measurement of electronic equipment with many uncorrelated distributed sources whose emissions are essentially stochastic. However, it has been found that the use of two probe scanning is very time consuming and requires large computer resources in terms of memory and processing power. In this paper methods for reducing the measurements for the characterisation of complex electronic devices is examined through the study of a typical electronic device. It is shown that without any a priory knowledge of the device under test it is difficult to reduce the measurement burden.