Diversity performance of personal communications handset antennas near operator tissue

Previous work shows that antenna diversity helps mitigate multipath fading suffered by personal communications transceivers. However, past diversity studies do not account for the effect that the operator´s tissue and movements have on the received signal envelope. This article first presents finite difference time domain (FDTD) simulations estimating the branch correlation coefficients for three different diversity-employing transceivers modeled with and without the presence of the operator. Measured envelope correlation coefficients from two different indoor propagation environments confirm the simulation results showing that excellent diversity performance may be obtained for personal communications antennas in the presence of a human operator.