Enhancing Antenna Design Flexibility: Project Merging in AN-SOF

Discover how AN-SOF’s project merging feature enhances antenna design flexibility by seamlessly integrating supporting structures, enabling performance comparisons with and without a support.

Key Takeaways

• AN-SOF’s project merging feature allows for combining wire structures from different projects, enabling comprehensive antenna system analysis.

• Importing wires simplifies the evaluation of combined structures’ electromagnetic response and facilitates comparison with individual responses.

• Supporting structures for antennas, such as towers and poles, can be saved as separate template files and later imported and merged with an existing antenna design.

Wires can be imported into AN-SOF from another AN-SOF project, allowing wire structures from different projects to be seamlessly merged into a new project. When a project is saved, a file with the extension .wre is also saved, containing the geometrical description of the wires. To import wires into a project, simply navigate to the File menu > Import Wires > AN-SOF Format, and select the .wre file you wish to import.

This feature enables the analysis of the electromagnetic response of an antenna and its supporting structure separately, and then combines them into a new project to analyze the response of the entire structure.

For example, one can model a directional antenna such as a Yagi-Uda or a Log-Periodic Dipole Array (LPDA) and analyze its performance in terms of antenna gain and bandwidth. This model can be saved as an individual project complete with the corresponding simulation results (input impedance, VSWR, gain, front-to-back ratio, etc.). In another project, one might have a broadcast tower and wish to install the directional antenna (Yagi or LPDA) using the tower as its supporting structure. In this case, the tower geometry can be imported into the directional antenna project, allowing a simulation to evaluate the changes in antenna gain and bandwidth due to the electromagnetic interaction with the tower. Figure 1 illustrates a tower and an LPDA in separate projects within the AN-SOF workspace, as well as both combined into a single project.

It’s important to note that electromagnetic responses, both near and far fields, do not simply add up because of the mutual interactions between the elements of each structure. Therefore, the calculation must be rerun for the combined structure.

When importing a structure into another project, it is often necessary to rescale it, reposition it, or rotate it around a specified axis. These operations can be easily performed using the Scale, Move, and Rotate functions available in the Edit menu.

An illustrative example can be found in our knowledge base: two 10 MHz dipole antennas mounted on a ship, as shown in Fig. 2. The ship model is stored separately, with seawater modeled as a PEC ground plane in AN-SOF due to its high conductivity at 10 MHz. The ship’s structure is grounded to simulate contact with water. Click the button below Fig. 2 to download the ship model file in AN-SOF format (.wre).

With AN-SOF’s importation feature, merging multiple projects is straightforward, making it a valuable tool for leveraging previously created structures and maintaining a library of antenna supporting structures as templates to be used when needed.