Investigating a horizontal helical antenna for use in the phantom monopole configuration

A phantom monopole was successfully simulated using wire loop antennas prior to this thesis work. These wire loop antennas have an undesirable input impedance, making them difficult to match and implement in physical building. A new type of antenna needs to be found that has a more desirable impedance while still maintaining the same near magnetic field and far field radiation pattern. The research done for this problem focused on a horizontally placed helical antenna. There is little research done on a horizontally placed helical antenna. The fact that there isn't information readily available meant that many different parameters of this antenna were investigated. A normal mode helical antenna was chosen because of its size and impedance. A helical antenna is an electrically small antenna, like the wire loop antenna, with an improved impedance compared to the wire loop. The work done not only dealt with computer simulation of the helical antenna, but also physical building of the antenna. The physical testing was done in order to get real world data and to support the computer modeling of the phantom monopole. Through testing and simulations, it was found that a horizontally placed helical antenna provided an alternative to the wire loop antenna originally used. By placing the helical antenna horizontally, the near magnetic field and far field radiation pattern mimicked those found in the original wire loop configuration. This means the phantom monopole is recreated using a new type of antenna that has an improved input impedance.