Analysis of a Navigation Antenna Installed on a Civil Airplane

M. V. T. Heckler, L. A. Greda*, and A. Dreher

German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Communications and Navigation
Oberpfaffenhofen, D-82234 Wessling, Germany

1. Introduction

Accurate navigation systems are important for aeronautical and safety-of-life

applications. In the civil aviation, for instance, the determination of the accurate
position of the airplane is crucial, especially during the final approach and landing. In
order to receive the signals from the satellites, a suitable position to install the antenna
is on the top of the fuselage, in a location “as free as possible” from reflections. This
assumption, however, must be validated with the assessment of the installed
performance of the antenna.

Several ways to assess the installed performance are already available [1]. One
common procedure is to perform measurements using scaled models [2]-[4]. One of
the limitations of this method is that not all the details of real airplanes and antennas
are in general exactly represented. Another way is using a real aircraft. This is a very
expensive measurement, especially if flight trials are necessary. However, real
conditions are present in this kind of test.

This paper presents some of the activities performed in the frame of the IPAS
(Installed Performance of Antennas on Aerostructures) project1 on the assessment of
the installed performance of a navigation antenna placed on a civil aircraft. The details
about the preparation of the airplane model for the simulations are described in the
next section. Then, computed radiation patterns are validated with experimental data
obtained by ground measurements. Finally, computed radiation patterns are presented
considering the airplane under flying conditions. All the electromagnetic simulations
have been performed using the package FEKO [5].

2. Electromagnetic modeling of the problem

Computations and measurements have been performed using one single element of the
navigation antenna described in [6]. For the computations, a CAD model of a typical
civil aircraft with propellers has been used and is shown in Fig. 1. For the
electromagnetic (EM) analyses, a surface mesh of the airframe has been generated
using the GiD package [7]. In order to make the mesh generation easier, the model has
been cut along the symmetry plane and only one half has been used. The complete
mesh has been obtained by mirroring the meshed part in a later step. The criterion for
the edge size of the surface triangular elements used was λ0/6 and the final mesh for
the complete aircraft resulted in 903,834 triangles.

1
The IPAS Project, Contract ref: AST3-CT2003-503611, was co-funded by the European
Commission within the Sixth Framework Programme (2002 – 2006).

978-1-4244-2042-1/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE

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 The modeling of the antenna structure mounted on the airframe would demand the
inclusion of dielectric parts. However, the presence of dielectric layers in the EM
simulations requires very large computational effort. Therefore, the geometry of the
antenna has not been modeled in our calculations. The far-fields radiated by the
antenna alone (before its installation on the airplane) have been computed with Ansoft
HFSS [8] and then imported into FEKO. The position where the antenna has been
placed is indicated by the small arrows in Fig. 1.

Due to the large size of the structure (~110 λ0 in both length and wingspan), the use of
the conventional method of moments becomes impractical. Computations using the
multi-level fast multipole method (MLFMM) were also not possible with the available
computational resources. Finally, it has been decided to perform the simulations
employing physical optics (PO). Fig. 2 shows the normalized computed current
density.

Fig. 1. CAD model of aircraft used in our analysis. The arrows on the top of the fuselage show
the position of the antenna.

Fig. 2. Computed surface current density (normalized).

3. Installed performance of the navigation antenna

The setup for the ground measurement is presented in Fig. 3, where the transmitting

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 (Tx) element is the navigation antenna on the airplane and the receiving part (Rx) is a
linearly polarized log-periodic antenna. Since other tests have been carried out in
Toulouse airport simultaneously to our measurements, the whole band of the Galileo
system could not be swept. This was the main factor governing the choice of the
frequency to be used in the measurements, which has been finally defined to be
1207 MHz. This frequency corresponds to the central frequency of the E5B band of the
Galileo system. Due to space restrictions in the Toulouse airport, the distance d in
Fig. 3 was 40 m.

Rx

antenna
location
d
Tx

Fig. 3. Setup of the ground measurements.

The validation of the field computations in the yaw plane has been undertaken. For
comparison, the computations of near and far-fields have been done, since, due to the
airplane dimensions, the far-field condition is not satisfied in our experiment. For the
near-field simulations the influence of the ground plane has also been studied. The
comparison between measured and computed results is presented in Fig. 4. Good
agreement has been obtained for angles between 30° and 220°. For angles between
225° and 340°, there is a poor agreement between the predictions and the experiment.
Some inaccuracies in the measured results are supposed to be the reason, since there
was a large airplane parked on this side and its wing was located close to the receiving
antenna. The presence of this aircraft beside our measurement site could not be
avoided on the day the measurements have been performed.

After the validation of our computations, the expected radiation patterns in the pitch
and roll planes (in-flight) have been calculated and are shown in Figs. 5 and 6,
respectively. The radiation pattern in these two planes seems to be acceptable for the
intended applications.

4. Conclusion

On-ground measurements using full-scale airplanes demand a large open area that may
not be completely free from other reflections than those coming from the ground.
Moreover, if measurements are to be done in an airport, the electromagnetic
environment may be very noisy, which can affect the measurement accuracy.

During the on-ground tests that we performed, the presence of an airplane close to the
measurement site could not be avoided. This contributed to inaccuracies obtained in
the measured results as previously discussed. In the other directions, where the

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 presence of this aircraft is not supposed to influence the measurements significantly,
the agreement between the measurements and the numerical predictions was very
good.

Fig. 4. Validation of the installed performance predictions.

Fig. 5. Computed directivity in the pitch Fig. 6. Computed directivity in the roll
plane. plane.

References
[1] IPAS Project Proposal, “Annex 1 – Description of Work”, FP6-2002-Aero-1-503611,
contract no. AST3-CT-2003-503611, September 2003.
[2] M. V. T. Heckler and A. Dreher, “Analysis of monopoles installed on airframes,” IEEE Int.
Symp. on Antennas Propagat., Washington, DC, Jul. 2005.
[3] M. V. T. Heckler and A. Dreher, “Analysis of planar 4x4 microstrip antenna arrays installed
on airframes,” 2nd European Conf. on Antennas and Propagat., Edinburgh, UK, Nov. 2007.
[4] A. Thain, G. Peres, J.-P. Estienne, G. Sylvand, P. Cailleu, P. Benjamin, I. Terrasse, G.-P.
Piau, G. Sabanowski, “Numerical modeling of aircraft antenna installations,” 2nd European
Conf. on Antennas and Propagat., Edinburgh, UK, Nov. 2007.
[5] FEKO user’s manual, EM Software & Systems – S.A. (Pty) Ltd, Aug. 2006.
[6] E. S. Neves, P. de Vita and A. Dreher, “Modular Smart Antenna Array for GPS and Galileo
Applications”, The European Navigation Conf. ENC-GNSS 2005, München, July 2005.
[7] GiD version 7.4.4b user’s manual, International Centre for Numerical Methods in
Engineering, Oct. 2003.
[8] Ansoft HFSS, Version 9.2.1. Ansoft Corp., 2006.

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