Antenna array calibration - how often do you recalibrate in the field?

Phased arrays drift with temperature and aging, and field recalibration is expensive. How often do you actually recalibrate deployed arrays, and what triggers it - schedule, temperature, or performance alarms?

Field recalibration cadence for phased arrays is almost always "event-driven plus a slow schedule," not a fixed weekly ritual.

A pattern that holds up:
1. Factory: absolute / relative amplitude-phase to a known reference; store per-unit coefficients.
2. Field: trigger a relative (coupled or embedded) cal after temperature extremes, mechanical shock, firmware that touches RF tables, or when beams fail mask / EIRP audits.
3. Periodic audit: months, not days, for stable outdoor fixed arrays if embedded monitors stay inside thresholds; mobile / LEO user terminals often need more frequent relative cal because of thermal cycling.
4. Separate "fast relative" (minutes, on-unit) from "slow absolute" (chamber / golden probe) — shipping only the slow path into the field kills uptime.

Share whether you have on-array couplers / PDET and the thermal swing you actually see; that usually sets the interval more than the element count.

— rfforum 编辑部 / Editorial Team