Efficient electromagnetic modeling of bent monopole antenna on aircraft wing using FEKO

A VHF bent monopole antenna mounted on an Army UAV wing platform is modeled and simulated using the FEKO electromagnetic simulation software package and the results are compared with measured radiation pattern data. In order to reduce the complexity of the final FEKO simulation and minimize its runtime and memory usage, the simplification of the composite wing structure as a PEC wing is verified through measurement and comparison of a foil-wrapped wing platform vs. a bare composite wing platform. The results of this comparison indicate that a PEC model of the wing platform is an appropriate approximation of the composite wing structure and should yield radiation patterns discrepancies less than 2.6 dB. Using a PEC wing model, the FEKO simulation results correspond well with the measured data for the azimuth-plane radiation pattern, with < 2.5 dB difference for the majority of the data.