Small Loop Antenna System Design for Radio Direction Finding

In this literature, a low-cost small loop antenna is developed for radio direction finding. It consists of two coupled rectangular counter-wiring loop antennas. A signal-processing circuit is developed also for demodulated outputs. A single rectangular loop antenna is discussed first for illustrating the receiving characteristics and then the proposed two coupled rectangular counter-wiring loop antennas are designed for radio direction finding. Measurements give a large linear detecting range. It is ready for Omni-directional application using another two coupled loop antennas and can be used as a tracking control device.

Plasma semiconductor antenna

The purposes of this work was to study the possibility of using photoconductive semiconductor antenna based on Ge or GaAs for receiving information signals in the frequency communications and satellite navigation bands and to study a scattering parameter S11 – a return loss (a reflection coefficient) of configurable loop antennas with laser-plasma control based on semiconductor photoresistor. It is shown that the addition of semiconductor photoresistor element in the loop antenna makes it possible to significantly expand its functionality and control its characteristics using an external laser source.

Ionospheric Clutter Suppression with an Auxiliary Crossed-Loop Antenna in a High-Frequency Radar for Sea Surface Remote Sensing

Ionospheric clutter is one of the main problems for high-frequency surface wave radars (HFSWRs), as it severely interferes with sea surface state monitoring and target detection. Although a number of methods exist for ionospheric clutter suppression, most are suitable for radars with a large-sized array and are inefficient for small-aperture radars. In this study, we added an auxiliary crossed-loop antenna to the original compact radar antenna, and used an adaptive filter to suppress the ionospheric clutter. The experimental results of the HFSWRs data indicated that the suppression factor of the ionospheric clutter was up to 20 dB. Therefore, the Bragg peaks that were originally submerged by the ionospheric clutters could be recovered, and the gaps in the current maps can, to a large extent, be filled. For an oceanographic radar, the purpose of suppressing ionospheric clutter is to extract an accurate current speed; the radial current fields that were generated by our method showed an acceptable agreement with those generated by GlobCurrent data. This result supports the notion that the ionospheric suppression technique does not compromise the estimation of radial currents. The proposed method is particularly efficient for a compact HFSWRs, and can also be easily used in other types of antennas.

A Flexible Single Loop Setup for Water-Borne Transient Electromagnetic Sounding Applications

Water-borne transient electromagnetic (TEM) soundings provide the means necessary to investigate the geometry and electrical properties of rocks and sediments below continental water bodies, such as rivers and lakes. Most water-borne TEM systems deploy separated magnetic transmitter and receiver loop antennas—typically in a central or offset configuration. These systems mostly require separated floating devices with rigid structures for both loop antennas. Here, we present a flexible single-loop TEM system, the light-weight design of which simplifies field procedures. Our system also facilitates the use of different geometries of the loop antenna permitting to adjust the depth of investigation (DOI) and the minimum sounding depth in the field. We measure the turn-off ramp with an oscilloscope and use the DOI to assess the minimum and maximum exploration depth of our single-loop TEM system, respectively. A reduction of the loop-antenna size improves early-time TEM data due to a reduced length of the turn-off ramp, whereas an increase of the loop-antenna size enhances the signal strength at late times, which allows to investigate deeper structures below the lake bed. We illustrate the capabilities of our system with a case study carried out at Lake Langau in Austria. Our results show that our system is capable of reaching a DOI of up to 50m (with a maximum radius of the circular loop of 11.9m), while it also resolves the water layer down to a minimum thickness of 6.8m (when the radius is reduced to 6.2m).