:: Electromagnetic Studies

Areas of Study

• Antenna near field
• Radio link performance
Antenna pattern distortion caused by nearby structures
• Other general electromagnetic studies

General electromagnetics studies are sometimes required by system designers or professional engineers in their studies on RF safety, co-location of antennas and urban radio system implementation.

Methods

We use several tools for electromagnetic analysis, for example:

• Our in-house moment-method software called MBC, which models electrically small and medium size structures as a combination of wires, plates and dielectric blocks.
• The Ohio State University NEC-BSC code which models electrically large structures composed of metallic and dielectric plates and cylinders using the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction (UTD).

  The developer of the MBC code and one of the founders of Phoenix Antenna Systems, the late Dr. Mark Tilston, spent many years updating and refining the MBC code since the beginning of his Ph.D. Thesis in 1983. One of the mathematically interesting features of the code is its use of the symmetric form of the mutual impedance integral between two distributed sources of electric current a and b, derived in PhD thesis by Mark Tilston, 1989, University of Toronto:

  

  The two terms inside the brackets are the inductive and capacitive terms. Symmetry is important because it enforces reciprocity, i.e., in an N-port analysis, we always get Zij = Zji (this is not the case in some other moment method approaches). An early version of the program is described in the "Multiradius" paper by Tilston and Balmain, 1990. For additional papers published by the late Dr. Mark Tilston, go here.