CHARACTERIZATION OF ELECTROMAGNETICALLY COUPLED SUPERQUADRIC LOOP ANTENNAS FOR MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS APPLICATIONS

Analysis of two mutually coupled loop antennas with arbitrary relative orientation and position and possibly different geometries is present ed. The antennas are represented by generalised superquadric curves, w hich include circular, elliptical, and rectangular loop geometries, an d they may be located either in a homogeneous region or next to an inf inite ground plane. A Galerkin-type moment method with piecewise sinus oidal subsectional basis and weighting functions is used. Special cons ideration is given to implement the solution using curved wire segment s instead of the commonly employed linear segments to improve computat ional efficiency. This very general computational tool is used to inve stigate the behaviour of coupled loops in configurations suitable for personal communications applications. A discussion of the use of anten na diversity to increase the received signal-to-noise ratio for commun ications equipment used in a multipath fading environment is also pres ented. Computational examples show that antenna diversity can provide significant improvements even for closely spaced loop antennas used in mobile communications applications.