Autumn

Components of Assessment	Method(s)	Percentage Weighting
Closed-book examination paper	Written	100%
Part-time Students:		Part time students may choose to complete the lab if their time allows. If they decide against it their exam mark will count 100% towards the assessment of the module.

Contact School for Details

• It is intended that this course will give a reasonably complete description of the antenna types and propagation modelling techniques currently in use in mobile and satellite communications.
• It is also hoped to convey some of the insights as to which parts of the very large body of published knowledge on these subjects are of fundamental importance; and to start the process by which students themselves may ultimately develop their own faculties in these areas.

The students graduating from this course should

• have a firm background of the basic principles underlying antenna performance (but not necessarily of design) and propagation behaviour in practical scenarios.
• be able to apply this knowledge to rather simple original, and therefore possibly non-representative, academic-style problems in a quantitative manner, for test problems which they have not met before as training exercises.
• be able to do more advanced representative problems for which they have been given a template
• be able to comprehend and understand the advanced analyses of others which they may meet in the literature and in their placements.

Component Principles, review of types of antenna (CT), 6 hours 

• Electric and magnetic fields, and relations between them.
• Review of Maxwell’s equation.
• Poynting Vector.
• Plane waves, impedance, velocity.
• Boundary conditions.
• Conductors and dielectrics.
• Categories of Antenna, lists of types, examples.
• Ideal short dipoles with uniform current distribution.
• Transmission lines, travelling and standing waves.
• Field calculations from known current distributions.
• Radiation patterns.
• Isotropic radiator.
• Simple doublet.
• Array antennas.
• Yagi-Uda antenna.
• Definitions of gain, radiation resistance, effective aperture.
• Matching and maximum power transfer.
• Near and far field regions.
• Field strength calculation.
• Aperture antennas.

Component Mobile Antennas, 3 h 

• Mobile Station Antennas - Monopole. Dipole. Loops. Helicals.
• Antenna fundamentals and size reduction techniques, practical realisation, radiation hazards.
• Base Station Antennas - Vertical gain. Colinears. Sector antennas. Corner reflectors. Printed Arrays. 

Component Propagation Principles, 3 h 

• Free space propagation. 
• Polarisation - linear, circular, elliptical, random. 
• Reflection - Specular reflection. Fresnel coefficients, polarisation effects. Rough and random surfaces.
• Refraction - Refractive index. Snell’s Law. Fresnel Transmission Coefficients.
• Diffraction - Huygen’s Principle. Knife-Edge Diffraction. Fresnel Zones. 

Component Propagation Models, 6 h

• Path Loss: Free space loss. Plane earth loss. Spherical earth effects.
• Path profiles - Line of sight versus non-line of sight. Multiple knife edge diffraction
• Tropospheric refraction - N-units. Effective earth radius. Inversion layers and ducting.
• Review of link budget calculations - Maximum acceptable path loss, noise. 

Component Terrestrial Mobile Channel Modelling, 9 h 

• Scales of Variation in Mobile Systems - Path loss. Shadowing. Fast Fading.
• Overview of Mobile Systems - Cell Types.
• Macrocells - Empirical: power law, clutter factor, Okumura/Hata. Theoretical: Multiple Building
• Diffraction, COST-231 Walfisch-Ikegami, flat edge. Comparison of theoretical and empirical models.
• Shadowing - Statistics. Availability at cell edge and over cell area.
• Microcells - Empirical: Dual slope, attenuation factor. Theoretical: Ray tracing, FDTD.
• Multipath Effects: Fast Fading Statistics.
• Megacells: Rain & Hydrometeor Attenuation. Gaseous Attenuation. Tropospheric Refraction. Tropospheric Scintillation. Depolarisation. Faraday Rotation. Group Delay. Dispersion. Ionospheric Scintillation. Local shadowing effects. Local multipath effects. Modelling.
• Diversity: Aims of diversity. Diversity Channel Model. Combining Methods. Selection Combining. Switched Combining. Equal Gain Combining. Maximum Ratio Combining. Types of Diversity. Spatial diversity. Mobile station. Base Station. Polarisation Diversity. Time diversity. Frequency Diversity.
• Adaptive antennas: Concept and aims of Adaptive Antennas. Beamforming. Optimum combining compared with maximum ratio combining. Suppression capabilities. Benefits and Challenges, MIMO. 

Component Satellite Propagation, 3 h

• Tropospheric Effects - Rain & Hydrometeor Attenuation. Gaseous Attenuation. Tropospheric
• Refraction. Tropospheric Scintillation. Depolarisation. Sky Noise Calculation.
• Ionospheric Effects - Faraday Rotation. Group Delay. Dispersion. Ionospheric Scintillation.
• A link budget calculation for the NASA Space Network

Lectures: 30 hours over 10 weeks

Labs: None

Assignment(s): None

15th August 2006