The reverberation chamber has for many years found application in the
EMC area. During the last seven years we have shown that it with great
advantage can be used also for antenna measurements as it emulates
effectively an isotropic multi-path propagation environment with
Rayleigh fading. The presentation will give the basic theory of
reverberation chambers, and show how the chamber can used to measure
radiation efficiency, free space radiation impedance, and diversity gain
of antennas; total radiated power and receiver sensitivity of mobile
phones and other wireless or mobile terminals (GSM, CDMA, DECT,
Bluetooth, UMTS); and channel capacity of MIMO antenna systems. The
chamber is the only known measurement instrument for realistically
measuring diversity gain and channel capacity; the alternative being to
drive measurement instruments around in an actual urban environment. A
major advantage with this new measurement method is that the
measurements fast and easily can be performed when the antenna or phone
is located in different talk positions relative to a head phantom or
other environments.