PAMS

As spacecraft antenna systems grow larger and more powerful, it has become correspondingly more difficult to measure them. Accommodating large antenna farms or deployable mesh antennas within standard test facilities may be impractical. The answer, developed by Astrium in Germany with support from ESA's Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) programme, is the Portable Antenna Measurement System. PAMS is a portable gondola (seen to the right) that can be suspended from existing cranes in any configuration around the satellite being tested, to build up a detailed picture of the antenna's surrounding electrical field from all directions.