Frank Jensen receives the AMTA Distinguished Achievement Award
We are proud to announce that our good colleague and TICRA employee for 40 years, Frank Jensen, was honoured at the AMTA 2013 banquet on Wednesday October 9, where he received the Distinguished Achievement Award. Frank receives this award in recognition of his developmental work in the area of spherical near-field measurements, compact range improvements & corrections, electromagnetic modeling applications for large satellite measurements, and noise reduction processing techniques.
Frank received his Master of Science degree from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 1968, and his Ph.D. in 1970, under supervision of professor Jesper Hansen (Electromagnetic Systems, DTU), during which he derived a theoretical formulation for the spherical near-field far-field transformation with full probe correction. He joined TICRA in 1972, and succeeded in winning a contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) under which the first practical implementation of the spherical method was established in 1975. Several contracts followed in which DTU served as main contractor and established the DTU-ESA Spherical Near-Field Antenna Test Facility. During this time, Frank developed dual-polarized near-field probes of unsurpassed high standard. He recognized that such probes could not be calibrated satisfactorily unless the probe mounting was hidden by absorbers or by a scattering controlling skirt, and that these additional components needed to be an integral part of the probe for calibration.
He has made significant contributions to the analyses of surface deviations and serration designs for large compact range reflectors, as well as scattering in the walls of the range. Frank has also derived corrections for positioner sag due to gravity effects when rotating heavy antennas under test. He has also been involved in the implementation of GTD (Uniform Geometrical Theory of Diffraction) and its application on large satellites for which reflections in the payload and solar panels may cause destructive interference. In recent years, he has been engaged in noise reduction on post-launch measurements of satellite antennas. In 2012, he celebrated his 40 year anniversary with TICRA.
He has been a member of AMTA since 1979 and a contributor to the AMTA Proceedings since 1991. He is a co-author with Jesper Hansen of the book “Spherical Near-Field Antenna Measurements”, Peter Peregrinus, London 1988. He holds a patent on horn antenna design with a skirt for controlled scattering.