Design of linearly polarized rectangular patch antenna using MoM, FDTD and FEM

Full wave electromagnetic field solvers have different shapes and methodologies to solve Maxwell´s equations according to the problem boundary conditions and geometry. This paper compares the accuracy, memory requirements and CPU time of 3 well known full wave antenna design packages applied to the design of a linearly polarized rectangular microstrip patch antenna with a probe feed operating in the L1 band (1.575 GHz). The three full wave methods used in this study are: 1) a method of moments (MoM) solver, 2) a finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver, and 3) a finite element method (FEM) solver. Simulation results were compared with measurements from a prototype for the |S₁₁|, |Z_in|, VSWR and the bandwidth.