A new strategy to reduce the far-field reconstruction error due to the finite size of the measurement region in planar and cylindrical near-field/far-field transformation techniques is presented. The approach exploits the (spatial) band-limitation property of the radiated field in order to estimate the field outside the measurement area. A number of different estimation algorithms are investigated, with reference to both the accuracy of the estimation and the required computational effort. Numerical and experimental results show that with a small computational effort, it is possible to obtain a significant improvement of the reconstructed far-field pattern with respect to that obtained without near-field extrapolation. ¿ 2000 American Geophysical Union