Effects of On-PCB location of radiating element on the performance of mobile terminal GPS antennas in multipath environment

Portable GPS mobile terminal antennas suffer from multipath effects. Environmental objects like vehicles, buildings, trees and ground plane (earth) make incident radio waves to reflect, diffract and scatter. Free space antenna parameters therefore, do not give an accurate account of antenna performance in real working scenarios. Statistical models are considered to be an efficient way to replicate the multipath environment and analyse the antenna operation in such environment. A novel statistical approach for characterisation of the environmental factors on the GPS antennas has been proposed by Ur Rehman et al. [1], [2]. This method models the open field multipath environment for the GPS operation and defines the antenna performance in terms of GPS Mean Effective Gain (MEG_GPS), GPS Angle of Arrival (AoA_GPS) distribution and GPS Coverage Efficiency (η_c). Position of radiating element on PCB/ground plane can affect the antenna performance in small terminal GPS antennas. This paper investigates the operation of IFA and DRA antennas in GPS multipath environment considering effects of different locations of the radiating element on the PCB/ground plane.