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Book Review |
Reinaldo Perez, Associate Editor |
Some of our readers may be familiar with the many antenna books presently on the market. The EMC membership is very familiar with antennas since it is part of our technology and industry. Why do we want to review an antenna book? Basically, for two reasons: 1) Antenna technology for mobile wireless communications systems is expected to evolve significantly within the next 10 years as the wireless personal communications revolution continues, and 2) This is not a book on antenna theory and methods for analysis and is not a book on computational analysis techniques for antennas, rather, the book is a timely account of the state of affairs of antenna techniques relating to communications, radar, and navigation with emphasis on systems. This book is intended for readers who are interested in knowing what is going on in the wireless telecommunications world. Many EMC engineers are already in this mode.
The book covers the areas of interest in land, maritime, satellite, and aeronautical mobile systems. The chapters in the book are organized by classification for application. The main chapters separately address land, maritime, satellite, and aeronautical mobile systems. The final chapter, a glossary, gives a large classification and other details that have a strong coordinating role in the book. For each chapter, attention is paid to design factors concerning propagation problems, operational requirements, and environmental conditions. The most important of the propagation problems, fading and the delay time effects caused by multipath propagation, are discussed in great detail. Discussion includes the relevance of various system parameters in antenna design such as communication zone, modulation schemes, frequency spectrum, interference, system signal-to-noise ratio, and bit error rate. The environmental conditions which affect mobile system performance directly are also discussed. Finally, proximity effects, which are caused by the interaction between the antenna and the body of the equipment, front-end circuits, and human operator, are also addressed since they are important factors that must be included in any antenna design.
The book is organized in eight chapters and one appendix. Chapter 1 titled "General View of Antennas in Mobile Systems," presents an overview of antenna systems, including some historical perspectives on mobile communications and related antenna technologies, trends, and antenna design concepts in modern mobile systems. Chapter 2 titled "Essential Techniques in Mobile Antenna System Design," discusses techniques applied specifically to mobile systems. The chapter discusses background material on technology, propagation, and antennas to support subsequent chapters. Problems related to propagation, radio transmission, choice of frequencies, communication zones, and interference are treated. This is followed by the requirements for antenna systems, discussion of proximity effects, and the evaluation of antenna performance in a mobile environment.
Land mobile systems are divided into three chapters. Chapter 3 titled "Land Mobile Antenna System I" covers fundamental issues and techniques concerning land mobile antenna systems, such as propagations, the design and application of antennas for both base and mobile stations, and diversity systems. Chapter 4 titled "Land Mobile Antenna Systems II" covers pagers and portable phone systems. The first part discusses the fundamentals and performance for different antennas in paging receivers. Antenna design for different kinds of paging receivers, with shapes such as the conventional box, pencil, and credit card is presented. In the second part of the chapter, antennas for portable phones are described. The last part of the chapter describes safety issues for portable mobile antenna systems. Of special interest to the computational electromagnetic community is the treatment, in Chapters 3 and 4, of the method of moments and finite difference time domain approaches for analyzing and designing mobile antennas. The material presented is only application oriented, which means that no discussions are made of these techniques, but instead the application of such techniques in designing these antennas is reviewed. Chapter 5 titled "Land Mobile Antenna Systems III" addresses antenna systems for different kinds of land mobile systems concerned with broadcast reception in a car, and communication in train and city bus systems. The design of a diversity antenna system for car broadcast reception requires the same technology as other mobile antenna systems. The challenge of receiving a TV broadcast from a moving vehicle is also addressed. In the chapter discussions are also made of how ferrite antennas can be used not only for receiving but also for transmitting.
Chapter 6 is devoted to mobile satellite systems embracing vehicle, shipborne, and broadcast applications. In the first half of the chapter, antenna systems deployed in satellites such as Inmersat are covered by introducing structure, performance, and characteristics of such antennas. The material is of introductory nature only. In the second part of the chapter antenna systems for trains and cars to communicate with satellites are discussed.
Finally, in Chapter 7 an introduction is presented of a wide variety of airborne antenna systems for communications and navigation (slot, spiral, microstrip patch, helical, and dipole). This book can be recommended as a reference in mobile antenna design. EMC