CCS/IWR6843AOP: IWR6843AOP

Hi Kisub,

    I am assuming casing you are referring to Radome. While selection of the Radome care need to be taken on choice of material, Distance to Antenna and thickness, 

You could refer to TI mmWave Radar sensor RF PCB Design, Manufacturing and Validation Guide applicaiton note chapter 5 on the guidelines.

https://www.ti.com/lit/an/spracg5/spracg5.pdf 

For the performance measurement, you could refer to Antenna radiation characteristics (round trip) given in the below link.  

https://dev.ti.com/tirex/explore/node?node=AGMzFzzFdFllMlyaWeXNlw__VLyFKFf__LATEST

 and you could compare with and without Radome, if there is significant degradation due to Radmoe/enclosure material.

Thanks and regards,

CHETHAN KUMAR Y.B.

Hello Kisub,

You could explore low cost anechoic chambers like shown below or any other similar system.

https://millibox.org/

For the antenna radiation pattern measurements, one would need controlled environment, where radar reflection should be from known reflection source could be predictable and should be higher value as compared to reflection coming from any other objects.

In some unavoidable cases, to reduce the reflections coming from other objects/sources, mmWave absorbers could be used to suppress/reduce the reflections. If there are reflections from the clutters and if it supersedes corner reflector reflection, it might results in wrong calibration values.

Known RCS corner reflector is a better source, it provides point target as compared to metal plate or similar reflecting materials, other reflecting objects may results in multiple objects reflecting from multiple places making calibration harder.

You could refer to various antenna radiation patterns for different EVM designs https://dev.ti.com/tirex/explore/node?node=AKu-aTm5FIcxlwZJU1pLBw__VLyFKFf__LATEST  for the reference. It has antenna radiation patterns for various antenna pairs used based on that you could arrive at the tolerance that your system desires.
For your system, you could plot the round trip SNR values from the peak measured from the corner reflector across azimuth and elevation angles. And you could do this measurements with and without Radome and compare the results.

Thanks and regards,

CHETHAN KUMAR Y.B.

Kisub,

    Above method described doesn't use Expensive Equipment such as network analyzer, or Spectrum analyzers. For the classic one way Radiation pattern measurement you would need Spectrum analyzers or Network analyzer and/or power meters. 

Hence round trip based Antenna radiation pattern measurement is suggested, In this case you would measure combined radiation pattern of Tx and Rx measured together. As Tx & Rx Antennas are identical, Hence Tx & Rx Antenna profiles could be deduced from that. 

You could use mmWave studio and Capture the raw ADC data (Using DCA1000 data capture board) and post processing tool to capture the peak SNR and change the antenna for Azimuth and elevation directions manually or through a stepper motor.

Also you could try with SDK running out of box demo with high resolution chirps (But size of the data is limited to available on chip ADC buffer memory, where as DCA1000 capture board will have large memory for Data collection and processing), You could use mmWave visualizer to mark SNR values and repeat above procedure for different azimuth and elevation directions. 

Thanks and regards,

CHETHAN KUMAR Y.B.