Simplified analysis of coated wire antennas and scatterers

A simple prescription due to Popovic enables any analytical or numerical formulation for scattering or radiation by arbitrary bare-wire antennas of circular cross-section to be used for antennas having an electrically-thin coating of dielectric and/or magnetic material. The prescription relies on transforming any coating to the equivalent magnetic one and treating it as an impedance per unit length. It is applied within an existing analytical treatment for scattering by a bare half-wave dipole to obtain predictions for the radar cross-section of dielectric-coated dipoles. It is also used with the bare-wire moment-method code NEC to derive the current distribution on a coated monopole antenna. Agreement with limits of the underlying theory are comparing the results of this prescription with those obtained by an explicit moment-method treatment of a dielectric coating