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Glossary

Term Definition
AR Axial Ratio — ratio of semi-major to semi-minor axis of the polarization ellipse, expressed in dB. 0 dB = perfect circular; ∞ dB = perfect linear.
CST Computer Simulation Technology — vendor for EM simulation; their .ffs Farfield Source format is supported as an RFlect export target.
Directivity Peak gain divided by spherical-average gain. The "shape" of the pattern, independent of efficiency.
ECC Envelope Correlation Coefficient — how correlated two antenna patterns are; matters for MIMO diversity.
Efficiency (η) Radiated power / accepted power. Includes ohmic and mismatch losses.
F/B Front-to-Back ratio. Gain at the peak direction minus gain at 180° from the peak.
Fernet Symmetric AES-128 + HMAC-SHA256 encryption scheme used to encrypt API keys at rest.
Gain Power radiated in a given direction per unit solid angle, relative to isotropic. Gain = Efficiency × Directivity. dBi units.
HPBW Half-Power Beamwidth, aka -3 dB beamwidth. Angular width where gain drops to half-peak.
HPOL / VPOL H- and V-polarization. Ludwig-3: HPOL → $E_\phi$, VPOL → $E_\theta$.
Kraus Approximation for efficiency: $\eta \approx 32400 / (\text{HPBW}_E \cdot \text{HPBW}_H)$. Only valid for moderately directional antennas.
LHCP / RHCP Left-/Right-Hand Circular Polarization. IEEE convention: looking in direction of propagation.
MCP Model Context Protocol — open spec for AI assistants to call tools on external servers.
MEG Mean Effective Gain — mean of the antenna gain weighted by the angular power spectrum of the environment.
PBKDF2 Password-Based Key Derivation Function. RFlect uses PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with 600 K iterations to derive the Fernet key.
SFF System Fidelity Factor — normalized cross-correlation between transmitted and received UWB pulses. 1.0 = perfect; 0.95+ usually good.
setup_group A free-text tag on a cal-drift run identifying its methodology epoch (e.g. pre-2024-cable-change). Mismatch is flagged when comparing across groups.
TRP Total Radiated Power. Integral of radiated power over the sphere. IEEE solid-angle formula with $\sin\theta$ Jacobian.
Touchstone Industry-standard .s2p / .s1p file format for S-parameters. RFlect's UWB pipeline reads .s2p.
VSWR Voltage Standing Wave Ratio. Derived from S11 magnitude. 1.0 = perfect match; 2.0 ≈ -9.5 dB return loss.
WTL Wireless Telecom Lab — the chamber-output format RFlect's parsers were built against (V5.02 / V5.03).
XPD Cross-Polarization Discrimination — co-pol field divided by cross-pol field, in dB. Uses 20 log, not 10 log.