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Advances in miniaturized radio tracking technology are helping to revolutionize the field of wildlife biology, especially with respect to studies of small birds. However, development of antennas for animal tracking applications often fails to formally account for the effects of the animal’s body on signal transmission. This letter describes an electromagnetic phantom that accurately represents a small bird. The phantom is validated with empirical measurements and can be easily scaled to represent larger or smaller bird species. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multistatic radar is a promising option for the low-cost collection of multiple-Doppler weather observations. However, due to the use of low-directivity antennas at the receivers in these systems, they typically suffer from extremely high two-way sidelobe levels compared to monostatic radars. Doppler velocity estimation biases induced by sidelobe contamination have proved to be a significant obstacle to more widespread adoption of this technology. It has been noted in the existing literature that the technique of sidelobe whitening, first developed for use in monostatic systems, has the potential to mitigate this issue. However, the existing sidelobe whitening algorithm is not suitable for use in this application, as it is only capable of achieving whitening in the two-way antenna pattern, whereas an algorithm to be used in the multistatic case must be able to achieve this result in the transmit pattern alone. This article proposes an alternate sidelobe whitening technique based on the method of alternating projections which allows for effective whitening in the one-way antenna pattern. A multistatic weather radar time-series simulator is used in conjunction with numerical weather prediction data to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method in mitigating multiple-Doppler measurement biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution presents the results of a dual-polarized radiating element designed to achieve low cross-polarization (lower than −40 dB measured for the E-and H-plane, at least −30 dB in the D-plane based on simulations) and large fractional bandwidth (18%) over wide scanning angles (±60°). The proposed design includes multiple features that enable high isolation between ports, reduction of spurious radiation, highly symmetrical radiated fields, and suppression of diffracted fields between contiguous subarray gaps. To verify the polarimetric requirements for a weather radar, simulated and measured results, including electronic scanning of the array and embedded element patterns of the antenna, are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growing interest in polarization diversity in communications and radar systems, the use of Ludwig’s second and third definitions has become controversial among scientists and antenna engineers. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to clarify some of the ambiguity and confusion caused by these definitions. A detailed comparison of Ludwig’s second and thirrd definitions of cross polarization, as applied to linearly polarized antennas, was performed. The results show that, in the diagonal plane, Ludwig’s second definition leads to a lower cross-polarization level than the third definition for $x$ - or $y$ -polarized current sources. For a Huygens source, by Ludwig’s third definition, the radiation pattern has a lower cross-polarization level than that obtained by Ludwig’s second definition. For some applications, the antenna is usually placed in the $y{z}$ plane. Therefore, new polarization bases are proposed according to which the source is used as a reference, and also on how this source is oriented in the $y{z}$ plane. To complement the theoretical framework demonstrated in this contribution and to provide readers with a better and simpler understanding of the cross-polarization definition, the analysis of several practical antennas for diverse applications was presented. Numerical and measured radiation patterns of wire and printed dipoles, rectangular patch, pyramidal horn, and open-ended rectangular waveguide (OEWG) antennas were investigated according to the polarization formulations presented in this paper. In addition, a dual-polarized element and a dual-polarized active phased array at broadside were utilized to generalize the application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A computer-aided technique is proposed to obtain the embedded characteristics of the elements in a cylindrical phased array using a unitcell approach in Ansys High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS). The proposed technique is general and can be used with other commercially available electromagnetic (EM) products that support periodic boundary conditions. Therefore, it can be widely adopted by engineers and researchers to analyze arbitrary element structures in cylindrical phased arrays. The implementation of the technique is discussed in detail, and the related formulation is presented. The method is verified by comparing its results with published literature as well as results obtained through full-wave analysis of a ring of microstrip patch antennas in HFSS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]