Long Wire antennas

Vee antenna and Rhombic antenna

Book sources: K. D. Prasad, J. D. Krauss

Long wire antennas - Theory

Consider a thin wire of length L is horizontally placed at a height from

ground plane. At one end a RF source is connected and other end is
terminated by the characteristics impedance of the wire Z0.
When the wire is excited with a sinusoidal signal, the wave should travel
along one direction and will not create any standing wave so called
Travelling waves.
We are gonna derive the expression for electric field at a point P - located
at a distance of R from the wire and angle of with respect to the length of
wire.
Wave direction

Zo

Travelling wave structure E field

The retarded current in the wire shall be described as

I I m sin

r Z1

C v

Where: v=p.c or p=v/c

p is the ratio of the wave velocity at the wire to the free space, called Relative
phase velocity. Used to vary with the attenuation constant.

P
R

Wave direction

Zo

Radiation pattern

We can find the radiation pattern as similar to the dipole case, will result:
E

I 0p
wL
sin
1 p cos
. sin

2R 1 p cos
2 pc

Here, is wave impedance.

cos max 1 0.37

For 3 and 5

Bidirectional long wire antenna

The maxima direction oriented with the direction of wave in the wire, so
by introducing wave on both the direction we can introduce Bidirectional radiation.
This can be possible by Open circuited long wire or Un-terminated, so
called Stand wave antenna.

Vee antennas

=2

By terminating with Z0, we can get Uni-directional radiation

Rhombic antenna

Based on the principle of Traveling wave and Vee antenna, Rhombic

antenna is a very high directive antenna has Diamond or Rhombus shape

Working of Rhombic antenna

By properly selecting the tilt angle, the
rhombic antenna will give additive effect
of radiation pattern of each long wire
antenna
The radiation mechanism is basically
depends on two factors:

Z0

Tilt angle ()
Height above the ground (h)

These are design parameters of antenna

Due to ground effect, the maximum
radiation is elevated about an angel ()

Design equations of Rhombic antenna

BBL field equation: (Bruce, Beck and Lowry 1935)

From this equation, we can deduce the condition to get the maximum
power direction with respect to height h and length of line L

Maxima with height

Maxima with Length L

Design formula

Finally, the design formulae are:

Example-1

If we assume the average beamwidth of rhombic antenna as 10 o, then

design the rhombic atenna such that it radiate maximum power over the
ranges from 10o to 40o for the operating frequency of 100MHz