Radiation Pattern of Arrays Mounted on Conical Structures

The paper discusses the method for determining radiation pattern of an array mounted on a conical structure. Two types of antenna elements are considered: waveguide openings and microstrip patch antennas. The analysis method is based on the modal representation of the EM field, i.e. the solution procedure takes advantage of representing the fields as a sum of spherical harmonics with unknown amplitudes. By introducing normalized associate Legendre functions, together with pre-calculation of terms that depend only on conical geometry, an accurate and efficient program has been developed. A comparison was made between the calculated radiation pattern and the measurements of different waveguide and patch array configurations. All the considered results showed high accuracy of the developed method