FEKO Tutorial #2 - Blade Antenna on a Metallic Cylinder

We’ll look at a FEKO with a more advanced view in this section. We’ll model a blade antenna, along with a cylinder that will represent the fuselage of an airplane. We’ll then determine the impedance, radiation pattern and S11 for this antenna. We also introduce EditFEKO, which is a way to edit the inputs to the FEKO solver without using CADFEKO. This can be sometimes useful, as we’ll see. First open up CADFEKO to a blank project. We’re going to define a bunch of variables – I won’t explain what each one is at the moment because it will be clear once we make the objects what they are. Define the following variables by right clicking on the variables label in the cadfeko tree (select Add Variable): Gap=0.1 BladeHeight1 = Gap + 1 BladeHeight2 = Gap + 12 BladeWidth = 3 CylinderLength = 80 CylinderRadius = 40 The variable tree should look something like this: I want to work in inches instead of the default meters. So I click Model->Model Unit and then select inches, and then ok. I want to make a cylinder to represent the fuselage. On the far left column of shapes, click the cylinder icon, and then enter the parameters as follows: Then click create, then close, and the cylinder will show up in the window, and under the geometry tree it will say Cylinder1. Note that all objects you create will be assumed to be metal (perfectly conducting) unless you specify otherwise. Now I want to make a blade for the blade antenna. I click the “create a polygon” button in the shapes column: Then enter the parameters as shown below: (Note you will need to have 5 Corners for this, so click the Add button twice to obtain 5 x,y,z locations to add). A wire will be used to connect the blade and the cylinder, and so we can add a wire source to the blade antenna. Draw a line from the cylinder to the blade with the following parameters, click create, then close. We have now defined all the geometry that we need for our blade antenna mounted on the side of a metallic cylinder. In the next section, we'll look at setting FEKO solver parameters. Next: Setting Parameters for the FEKO Solver Previous: Requesting Outputs, Running FEKO and Using PostFEKO FEKO Menu Topics Related To Antenna Theory Antenna Tutorial (Home)