Full modeling of wideband volumetric antennas by elementary sources placed on the ground plane

A very accurate modeling technique of volumetric antennas is presented in this work. Specifically, an equivalent model based on a set of elementary sources of infinitesimal colocalized dipoles is obtained by using a genetic algorithm jointly with the application of the translational addition theorems of spherical waves. The equivalent sources that model the whole behavior of the volumetric antenna (not only the transmitting characteristics, but also its reflection, reception, and scattering properties) are located on the metallic ground plane, i.e. a planar set of sources is achieved to model nonplanar radiating devices, which increases its efficiency significantly, since the number of infinitesimal dipoles can be reduced considerably allowing the process to be much faster. Efficient wideband modeling is achieved by means of the construction of different models at very few frequency samples. The obtained full models are valid outside of the antenna minimum sphere. This way, it can be employed to the study of near–field interactions, such as arrays of antennas whose minimum spheres do not overlap.