Non-Foster vs. active matching of an electrically-small receive antenna

We consider herein a comparison between non-Foster matching and classical active matching, in which a transistor buffer stage is placed at the antenna terminals. We found the active-antenna approach to be quite effective, with a performance actually surpassing that of an earlier non-Foster circuit. Further work has led to the development of an enhanced NIC that restores the preeminence of non-Foster matching. Using an 8 dB noise-figure receiver over the frequency band 30-200 MHz, we show that non-Foster matching to an electrically-small antenna gives up to 5 dB improvement in S/N as compared to a well-designed active-matching approach to the same antenna.