Junction discontinuities in wire antenna and scattering problems

An alternative treatment of junction discontinuities in wire antennas and scatterers to that used by Chao and Strait [1], Chao et al. [2], and Taylor et al. [3], is presented. Comparisons with published experimental results and with computations by Chao and Strait [1] have been made to verify the accuracy of the method. The method involves replacing the junction with an equivalent charge distribution found from the integration of the continuity equation in the vicinity of the junction to obtain the constraint on the currents at the junction. The approach is particularly applicable to method of moments [4] calculation employing pulse expansion functions, although it may be applied with any subsectional method of moments solutions. The method is accurate and convenient for programming purposes.