Validation of antenna coupling and channel modeling in a real propagation environment

The main goals of this work is to gain understanding of antenna coupling in real propagation environments and to assess the possibility to separately model the antenna and the propagation channel. It is shown that ideal antenna coupling modeling is accurate also for real dipole antennas. Further it is indeed validated that antenna and propagation channel modeling may be separated without degrading the modeling accuracy. The most important observed effect of antenna coupling is efficiency loss. Moreover, the coupling results in antenna decorrelation which may partly compensate the efficiency loss depending on the specific transmission scheme used.