Investigation on pattern distortion of landscape-compliant 3G base-station antennas

The increasing popularity of mobile technologies and services is originating a dense geographical concentration of base-station equipments (BSE) in both rural and urban environments. In order to reduce the environmental impact, a few cures are beginning to be adopted, such as camouflage structures. Typical solutions are painting the antennas with the same texture of house walls, hiding the BSE pylon by means of an artificial tree or including the BSE within a chimney-pot-like radome for over-building applications. This last solution could, however, cause serious problems to the correct antenna working conditions. The paper presents a numerical investigation into the pattern distortion effect due to several kinds of chimney-pot-like radomes when it 3G panel antenna is considered (f=1970 MHz). A measures-calibrated two-dimensional model permits a detailed parametric analysis to be easily performed through variation of both electrical and geometrical parameters, with the purpose of deriving guidelines for the design of mechanically robust and low-distorting radomes.