Simulating wide-bandwidth planar monopoles suitable for vehicles

The reception of future mobile phone and multimedia services that will be standard features for vehicles in the near future will need ,for aesthetic reasons, to go through a single antenna. Therefore, planar monopole antennas have been suggested for this purpose because of their wide impedance bandwidth and reasonable radiation pattern. A simple planar monopole antenna has been designed out of inexpensive aluminium extrusion readily available in Australia. For vehicular applications, the emphasis has been to replace the traditional vertically mounted /spl lambda//4 "whip" antenna. This paper has introduced a method for drawing complex antenna shapes and importing them into FEKO for simulation. The same method can be adapted and used for other electromagnetic simulation software and thus is not just limited to FEKO.