EE4016 Lab 1 Report

Cagin Sari
February 2023

Question 1: Does the dipole geometry satisfy the thin wire approximation?
Conditions for thin wire dipole:
1) In a thin wire dipole, the current only flows on the surface and in this Lab session, the material
of the dipole was set to PEC so the current will flow on the surface of the dipole.
2) The generator used in this lab session is assumed ideal where the voltage does not change
with the input impedance of the dipole.
3) The wire used is very thin and the feed gap is also very small
4) the dipole has a very small end capacitance so it can be ignored
5) Flow of current is only significant in the direction z
All the conditions for the thin wire dipole given above have been satisfied.

Question 2: How is the dipole excited?

Dipole is excited using a port between two wires where current is defined to flow on the surface of
the dipole.

Question 3: Check at what frequency the magnitude of the current in the feed point
is maximal.
From figure 1 maximum current was found to be −18.35dBA at 0.25GHz.

Question 4:Check what happens with the input impedance of the dipole at that fre-
quency.
At frequency, 0.25GHz Impedance reaches value of 51.1 − 50jOhm. By looking at the figure 1 one
can observe that maximum current and minimum impedance happens at frequencies very close to
each other.

λ
Question 5:Does this frequency correspond to 2 dipole length? If not, why not?
No this does not correspond to the λ2 resonance frequency. Ideally, the resonance frequency of this
dipole needs to be at 300M Hz however it is found to be 250M Hz. This difference means that the
dipole behaves larger than its physical size and this is caused by the currents flowing in different
directions at the end of the dipole, this is causing end capacitance and results in larger electrical
length causing lower resonance frequency.

1
Figure 1: Change in the port current and impedance with changing frequency.

2
(a) linear plot of Electric fields for theoretical and (b) logarithmic plot of Electric fields for theoreti-
simulated results cal and simulated results

Figure 2: linear and logarithmic far-field plots of the dipole thin wire antenna

Question 6: Compare the electric far-field distribution of the radiated field at that
-maximum current- frequency with the theoretical (approximate) prediction by using
the radiation intensity given in Practicum 1 document
Looking at the figure 2a and 2b it can be observed that theoretical results have a higher peak
magnitude of the far-field electric field this is more pronounced in the linear scale. One of the
reasons this is happening might be the matching between the dipole antenna and the generator
because although the port impedance was set to 50Ohm at the resonance frequency dipole input
impedance only gets down to around 51.4 − 50jOhm. Another reason might be the ohmic losses in
the dipole antenna, which might also result in a lower far-field amplitude.

Question 7: Determine the antenna bandwidth (the frequency band at which the re-
flection coefficient is less than -10 dB) for two values of the reference impedance Z0 =
50 Ohm and 75 Ohm.
For 50 Ohm reference impedance, bandwidth is found to be 28 MHz whereas for 75 Ohm Bandwith
is found to be 44.4 MHz. This can also be observed from 3.

Question 8:Is there only one operational band of the antenna? Is there any difference
between radiation at the basic (lowest) frequency band and other frequencies? To
answer this question, specify the reference impedance Z0=75 Ohm, end frequency = 1
GHz.
As also shown in the figure 3 there is a second resonance at a frequency equal to 0.85 GHz however
the real part of the impedance is around 100 Ohm and the imaginary part is 0 Ohm, one disadvantage
is the reflection coefficient is -14dB which is much higher than the -31 dB which occurs at the first
resonance meaning a significant amount of power will be reflected when 50 Ohm transmission line
is connected.

3
 Figure 3: Reflection coefficient for port impedance of 50 and 75 Ohms

Figure 4: Reflection coefficient plot for frequency range 0.24-1GHz with port impedance set to 75
Ohm.