Application of AGATE (A Finite-Difference Time-Domain Tool) to Antennas on Complex Platforms

The Radio Frequency and Antennas (RF & A) Group, SELEX Communications UK, employ a suite of specialist modelling tools to analyse the electromagnetic (EM) environment of large, complex, air, land, sea and human platforms. AGATE, a proprietary code developed by the BAE SYSTEMS Advanced Technology Centre that implements the FDTD method, has proved to be an invaluable part of the toolkit. The FDTD technique is often more robust than other methods, having a number of advantages in particular with regards to being more tolerant of a low quality input mesh representing the CAD. The main sources of error in FDTD are numerical dispersion and discretization errors. This paper will consider the impact of these errors when using FDTD to model installed antenna performance for a set of case studies of different antenna systems. Guidelines are also provided for achieving accurate models.