The 40 foot anechoic chamber is 20 ft tall x 20 ft wide x 40 ft long. The chamber surfaces are lined with pyramidal microwave absorber using 5" absorber on the side walls & the vertical scanner panel and 8" absorber on the back wall, floor & ceiling. This enables the range to be used at frequencies of 7 GHz and above.

The chamber is situated approximately 10 ft below ground and can be accessed through a ground level anteroom with double doors into the chamber and a crane for lifting hardware into the chamber. The 40 foot chamber uses a 1-ton mono-rail crane which extends from the anteroom to approximately 10 ft into the chamber. The ground level temperature controlled anteroom is approximately 18 foot x 18 foot with a 10 foot ceiling and has a roll-up door access.

The chamber has a separate control room which houses the control electronics for the measurement system. The equipment in the 40 foot anechoic chamber is currently configured for cylindrical near field measurements. The cylindrical nearfield system used in the 40 foot chamber is a custom JPL design and uses a JPL custom data collection system along with near-field to far field transformation software developed through a contract with the National Institute of Standards (NIST). The cylindrical scanner system uses a premium Aerotech turntable that enables accurate measurement of antennas to at least 94 GHz.

The large 9 ft rotation radius enables measurement of large structures such as the 2.5 m x 3 m Wide Swath Ocean Altimeter (WSOA) reflectarray shown below.