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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.