An Optimum Design of Low-Profile Ultra-Wideband HF

Skeletal Wire Duoconical Monopole Antenna with Parasitic

Grounded Poles
X.-L. Zhang1 H.-T. Gao2 Q.-C. Zhang1

Abstract − This paper presents a low profile ultra-wideband HF

skeletal wire duoconical monopole antenna with parasitic 2 GEOMETRY OF THE ANTENNA
grounded poles, which is then optimally designed using Dn
efficient tool called charge and current marching-on-in-time The traditional skeletal wire duoconical antenna is
(CCMOT) algorithm for analyzing thin-wire antennas together shown as the left geometry in ‹‰—”‡ͳ. H1 denotes the
with the genetic algorithm (GA). As a result, an ultra-wideband
HF antenna working between 7.5MHz and 25MHz is obtained, height of the lower cone, H2 the height of the upper
which is only less than one-fifth maximum wavelength high and cone, R the maximum radius of the cones, d the feed
composed of five wires and five grounded poles. Its VSWR in
the whole frequency band is no more than 2.5 and the computed height towards the ground plane. The whole height of
gain is above 0dBi when erected on a real ground through a the antenna is about 0.2ɉmin, where ɉmin is the
metal grid ground screen. The design in the paper is of great
significance to the HF communication or multi-band HF surface
wavelength of the lowest operation frequency. It is
wave radar. much smaller than wire conical monopole antenna and
easier to be installed on the ground when it works at
1 INTRODUCTION HF band. Ropes can be stretched along the upper part
of the wires from the top of the antenna to the points
Duoconical monopole antenna is a promising
fixed at the ground. When erected on an infinite
wideband antenna which is more compact than conical
monopole when working at the same cut-off frequency perfect ground plane, the antenna radiates horizontally
[1-2]. Like conical monopole antenna, duoconical and sidelobe in elevation will get higher as the
monopole antenna is often used at VHF or UHF band frequency increases. In many cases, e.g. HF surface
for a moderate size. When working at lower frequency wave radar, higher gain will be expected near to the
band, skeletal wire duoconical or conical monopole horizontal direction. To this end, parasitic grounded
antenna is applied to simplify the manufacture and poles can be added around the antenna from the art of
installation. Reference [3-5] studied the characteristics
designing the sleeve monopole antenna, shown as the
of the skeletal wire conical antennas and pointed out
that the antenna with more wires would have a closer right geometry in ‹‰—”‡ ͳ. The distribution of the
performance to the solid conical monopole antenna. current on the conical will be changed to keep the
However, more wires will increase the complexity of maximum radiation near to the horizontal direction in
the geometry and installation difficulty, especially at the operation band of about 4:1 bandwidth [7]. The
the HF band. height of the parasitic grounded poles and the radius
This paper presents a skeletal wire duo-conical of the circle where the grounded poles sit are denoted
antenna with simple geometry which is then optimized
at HF band from 7.5 to 25MHz by the GA. The as h and r, respectively.
CCMOT [6] method is applied to analyze the wire
antenna. The optimized antenna is then simulated
when erected on a real ground through a grid metal
screen. The consequent VSWR and gain indicate that
the designed antenna has a good performance and can
be employed in HF communication or multi-band HF
surface wave radar. In section 2 the geometry of the
antenna is described and the applied methods
including numerical modeling and optimization
algorithm are detailed in section 3. The performance
of the optimized antenna is discussed in section 4 and
the paper is concluded in section 5.

Figure 1: The geometry of the skeletal wire duo-

conical antenna with parasitic grounded poles

________________________________________________________________________________________
1
Department of Antenna, East China Research Institute of Electronic Engineering, Hefei, 230088, China,
e-mail: [email protected], tel.: +86 551 65391189, fax: +86 551 65391000.
2
School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430079, China, e-mail: [email protected].
978-1-5090-0470-6/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
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3 MODELING AND OPTIMIZATION 3.2 Optimization

3.1 Numerical modeling The lowest working frequency of the skeletal wire
duoconical monopole antenna is determined by its
Since the skeletal wire duoconical monopole antenna total height and volume, while its radiation
is composed of thin wires, MoM can be a good characteristics can be optimized by adjusting the ratio
alternative for numerical analysis, in which only of H1 to H2 and the parameters of the grounded poles.
segments along the wires are used. However, the time The optimization method GA can be applied to
domain method CCMOT [6], which uses the same produce an optimum geometry, since it is a highly
discretization rules as MoM and can give results at all non-linear problem to design the antenna. For a given
frequencies through a single fast computation, would number of the wires and a given feed height, an
be more efficient, especially for this wideband objective function for considering both performance
antenna. Infinite perfect electric conductor (PEC) is of impedance and radiation is defined as in (1)
defined as the ground to simplify the modeling and
optimization. By image theory, a dipole model in free f ( x ) = α1 ¦
( i 0 i )
N U VSWR ( f ) , VSWR ( f )

(VSWR0 ( fi ) )
2
space is analyzed instead in CCMOT. The input n =1

impedance of the monopole is half that of the modeled N U ( G0 ( f i ) , G ( f i , θ 0 ) )

dipole while the gain is double. +α 2 ¦ (1)
(G ( f ))
2
When the optimization is finished, the PEC ground n =1
0 i
is replaced with a metal grid screen on the real ground
where x = [ H1 , H 2 , R, h, r ] , α1 , α 2 are the factors to
T
which is needed in practical use. FEKO which can deal
with the infinite dissipative ground by solving the adjust the weights of the impedance and radiation in
Somerfield’s integral will be used to analyze the objective function, VSWR0 ( fi ) , G0 ( f i ) are expected
antenna on the real ground.
VSWR and horizontal gain at the ith frequency, and
­° ( x − y )2 , x ≥ y
U ( x, y ) = ®
°̄ 0 , otherwise
GA toolbox contained in Matlab is applied to
optimize the geometry of the skeletal wire duoconical
monopole antenna, together with the CCMOT method
programmed with FORTRAN codes. Input and output
files are used to pass parameters between the two
softwares. The flowchart of the optimization is shown
in Figure 3.

Figure 2: The input impedance of a skeletal wire

duoconical monopole antenna

As an example, a wire duoconical antenna is

analyzed by CCMOT and other two softwares based
on MoM, FEKO and NEC2. The calculated input
impedances shown in Figure 2 where the number in
the parenthesis represents the number of segments in
one minimum wavelength in the simulated frequency
band, indicate that results from CCMOT agree well
with those from FEKO, with different lengths of
segment. However, the results from NEC2 do not
converge as the segment length decreases. Therefore,
the CCMOT algorithm maintain a considerable
accuracy even being used to analyze thin-wire
antennas with junctions of multiple wires, which
attributes to the accurate treatment of the junction
using current continuity principle. Besides, the cpu
time cost by CCMOT has little difference with the
requested number of frequency while the cpu time by
FEKO or any other frequency method is in proportion Figure 3: The flowchart of the optimization together
to the requested number of calculated frequencies. with GA and CCMOT

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4 RESULTS AND DISSCUSION analyze the optimized antenna on the real ground
through a metal grid screen. The VSWR, gain,
A skeletal wire duoconical monopole antenna is elevation angle and elevation pattern are shown in
designed at HF band between 7.5 to 25MHz, according Figure 6, Figure 7 and Figure 8, which indicate that
to the above method. Assuming d=0.1m and fixing the the VSWR is below 2.3 in the whole operation
number of the wires N as 3 to 6, the optimization is frequency band, the gain above 0.2dBi. Furthermore,
conducted 4 times, the optimized geometries are the optimized antenna radiated mainly towards the
shown in Table 1 and the VSWR and gain are shown horizontal line and no evident sidelobe is found in
in Figure 4 and Figure 5. It can be seen that at the high elevation.
end of the frequency band, the gain decreases as the
number of the wires N increases, while the VSWR
decreases. The skeletal wire duoconical monopole
antenna with 5 wires would be of good performance
considering both impedance and radiation
characteristics. It is 7.5 meters high, which is less than
one-fifth maximum wavelength in the operation
frequency band.

N H1 (m) H2 (m) R (m) R (m) h (m) Figure 6: The VSWR of the optimized antenna on the
real ground through a metal grid screen
3 0.22 7.18 2.39 0.88 2.23
4 2.45 4.95 2.63 0.79 2.55
5 3.26 4.14 2.99 0.82 2.57
6 3.88 3.52 2.93 0.81 2.07

Table 1: The optimized geometry of the antenna

Figure 7: The gain and elevation angle of the

optimized antenna on the real ground through a metal
grid screen

Figure 4: The VSWR of the optimized antenna

Figure 8: The elevation pattern of the optimized

antenna on the real ground through a metal grid screen

5 CONCLUSION

A low-profile ultra-wideband HF skeletal wire

duoconical monopole antenna with parasitic grounded
Figure 5: The gain of the optimized antenna poles is optimized together with CCMOT method and
GA in this paper. For its simple geometry, ease to
The optimized skeletal wire duoconical monopole
install and great performance on the real ground, the
antenna is installed on the real ground through a metal
optimized antenna can be employed in HF
grid screen, covering an area of 16 by 16 meters with
communication or multi-band HF surface wave radar.
each grid of 0.5 by 0.5 meters. The average ground is
Besides, the method in this paper can be used to design
assumed with a relative permittivity of 13 and a
other wire antennas optimally.
conductance of 0.005S·m-1. FEKO is employed to

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