A method to improve computation efficiency for the radiation pattern of an airborne antenna

The authors propose a technique to improve the computation efficiency for an airborne antenna pattern by reducing the number of computation terms. In order to do that, an algorithm is presented for evaluating the contribution of each ray path to the total pattern and for searching for dominant terms. As a criterion of this evaluation, they have noted that the field incident on each edge which becomes a diffracted field. The field strength propagating along each ray path is also checked to find the dominant terms. A small twin engine aircraft is employed as an example of applying the evaluation method. The radiation pattern of an antenna mounted on the aircraft has been calculated by their algorithm. The pattern obtained by the conventional UTD analysis is also presented, in which many computation terms including dominant and minor terms are integrated. The patterns presented by these methods are compared to test the accuracy and computation efficiency of their method. Measurement is also made using a scale model aircraft in order to check the accuracy of the method