Experimental activity in using a reverberation chamber for emission and shielding effectiveness measurements: comparison with traditional deterministic methods

The paper concerns the comparison between reverberation chamber measurements (RC) and traditional deterministic measurement techniques: in particular, examples of emission and shielding effectiveness (SE) measurements are presented. The emission of a box with apertures, and an arbitrary source inside, is estimated by RC measurements and compared to those obtained in OATS. Moreover, the SE of a braided shield coaxial cable and the SE of a metallic box with an aperture, covered by a metal loaded plastic material, are recovered in a reverberation chamber. In this case the comparison is performed with other measurement techniques, the triaxial and the absorbing clamp methods for the cable SE, and with a direct illumination free space measurement in the case of the SE of the metallic enclosure. In the emission case, the directivity choice is fundamental to predict the worst case level, corresponding to a particular direction and polarization for the receiving antenna in the OATS. A similar situation occurs for the SE of the box, in the sense that the worst case, a particular direction and polarization of the incident wave, is hidden in the “mean” in the reverberation chamber.