A New Design Approach for Electrically Small High-Frequency Antennas

The design of electrically small high-frequency (HF) wire antennas continues to be a challenging effort, primarily due to the tradeoffs involved in reducing antenna electrical size while attempting to maintain some level of acceptable impedance and bandwidth at lower frequencies. There are numerous examples of practical applications where antenna physical dimensions must be restricted. This letter presents a new concept in electrically small wire antenna design that seeks to address those real restrictions by providing new design methods for functional electrically small antennas when traditional methods fail. This new concept is based upon using the entire volume for antenna design. New designs are presented along with a comparison of performance characteristics obtained through simulation and experimentation. Significant improvements in performance using the proposed methodology are demonstrated, including increases in radiation resistance of up to 28% and reductions in Q of more than 20% as compared to antenna geometries with identical heights and volumes.