SPHERICAL COORDINATES

Understanding Spherical Coordinates is a must for the practicing antenna engineer. You are
probably familiar with Cartesian Coordinates - a position (point P) can be specified by a triplet
like (x,y,z) where x is the distance from the origin to the point along the X-axis, and so on (see
Figure 1). Spherical coordinates use a different coordinate system, one with spherical
symmetry, which makes it very useful in engineering and physics in certain problems.

Figure 1. A point P defined in the Cartesian Coordinate System.
The point P could be specified relative to the same origin in a different coordinate system.
Spherical coordinates utilize three distinct coordinates:
R - the magnitude of the distance between the origin and the point (always positive)
- angle between the z-axis and the vector from the origin to the point (ranges from 0 to 180
degrees)
- angle between the x-axis and the projection of the point onto the x-y plane (ranges from 0
to 360 degrees)


Cartesian coordinates to spherical transformation

Example: The point P=(0,6,5) can be evaluated in spherical coordinates as:


The coordinates are illustrated in Figure 2:

Spherical coordinates are popular for antennas, because we often are only interested in the
antennas response in a particular direction, not how far away something is (radiation patterns
die off as 1/R^2 for all antennas in the far field). In Cartesian coordinates, 3 variables need
specified to determine the direction from the origin, and it is not intuitive. For spherical
coordinates, once it is understood, the polar angle and the azimuth angle can be readily
used.