That has been my experience as well, at work we have a multi-kilobuck simulation package but we still put the antenna on our range to test it. The range consist

That has been my experience as well, at work we have a multi-kilobuck simulation package but we still put the antenna on our range to test it. The range consists of basically a robot arm that can hold the antenna under test (AUT) in any orientation, a transceiver/spectrum analyzer that can move forward or back to get into the near, Fresnel, and far ranges, and a transceiver/spectrum analyzer that is connected to the AUT. Comparing simulations to actual always yields some interesting nuggets of information.