| The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. First, to develop an interface between Matlab and Numerical Electromagnetics Code (NEC2). Matlab is a popular commercial mathematical programming environment. NEC2 is a command-line driven numerical electromagnetic field solver in popular use due to its powerful capabilities to handle many varieties of wire antennas and their feed networks, and the fact that its Fortran source code is freely available. The second and main purpose of this thesis is to use this NEC2/Matlab interface to study adaptive antenna array processing.; Typically, geometric interference patterns, known as the array factor, are used for a first-order approximation to antenna array patterns but do not address the effects of mutual coupling between antennas. The Matlab interface automates much of this process and overcomes this obstacle in addition to offering powerful graphical display options for the output.; This study shows that the computed radiation pattern of the array can differ dramatically from the array factor. This knowledge can be used to design optimized antenna arrays to perform closer to expectation in real world applications. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
