Performance of a side-mounted PIFA in cluttered environment for GPS operation

Performance of the GPS mobile terminal antennas is severely affected by the surrounding environment. The incident radio waves experience reflection, diffraction and scattering due to the presence of vehicles, buildings, trees and ground plane (earth) near to the receiving GPS antenna. A statistical model has been proposed by Ur Rehman et al. [8], [9] to evaluate and characterise the environmental factors on the GPS mobile terminal antennas. This method needs the information of 3-D free space antenna gain patterns and average angular distribution of incident power in the environment. This technique assesses the performance of the GPS antenna in terms of two novel parameters namely GPS Mean Effective Gain (MEG_GPS) and GPS Coverage Efficiency (η_c). This paper presents a novel design of the GPS mobile terminal PIFA antenna. The antenna is fabricated and tested in anechoic chamber for free space operation. The performance of the proposed antenna is also investigated in GPS multipath environment using the statistical approach. Usefulness of this antenna is analysed by comparing its performance to that of the dipole and CP microstrip patch antennas reported in [9].