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This letter describes the effects of atmospheric attenuation on reverberation-chamber measurements in the mmWave range. It is evaluated using chamber-decay time, as the atmospheric attenuation is also defined as the rate of decay. We describe a method to de-embed atmospheric attenuation to evaluate for which cases it has a measurable impact and show results from 50 to 140 GHz, including uncertainty. We report a measurable impact in the used chamber when the attenuation is approximately 2 dB/km. We report this effect to show that the chamber loss can be dominated by atmospheric attenuation at higher frequencies. This can lead to increased measurement uncertainty or can make reverberation-chamber measurements highly impractical in a similar setting. With a climate-controlled environment, this can potentially be overcome.

In this article, we design and verify a millimeter-wave (mmWave) reverberation chamber (RC) operating in the 24–140-GHz band. The chamber is designed to facilitate over-the-air measurements of next-generation integrated antennas operating at high frequencies. For such systems, it is important to perform fast and accurate measurements of the radiated or received power over a wide frequency range. The reproducibility of our proposed chamber configuration is on average over the frequency band better than 0.2 dB when using the minimum advised number of mode-stirring samples. The chamber loss does not exceed 42 dB, and the chamber-decay time remains approximately $0.3 \mu \text{s}$ across the frequency range, indicating that the chamber would likely remain operational above 140 GHz. As an example of the performance of the chamber, we show that antenna-efficiency measurements can be performed within only a few percent expanded uncertainty.

The article discusses over-the-air (OTA) measurement techniques for integrated radio frequency (RF) electronics and antennas including phased array antennas. Topics discussed include traditional OTA testing methods, the use of the reverberation chamber as an alternative for OTA testing, and the measurement of radiated power spectral density.