Applications that may require custom antennas are numerous and include: telemetry, metering/monitoring equipment, hand-held controls, body-worn equipment, countersurveillance, testing, RFID, safety, tracking, security and special purposes. Such requirements often arise due to particular mechanical constraints (e.g. small case size) or particular directional or polarisation properties and frequency characteristics being needed. Special purposes examples include: direction-finding, EMI detection and analysis, metal detection, location systems, low-frequency vicinity detection, dual-band antennas, unconventional RFID and induction-heating.
With our investment in electromagnetic CAD modelling software, our background expertise and information resources, we are able to offer this capability for: antenna concept generation and evaluation; optimisation and analysis of antennas and electromagnetic systems, from low frequency to microwave. Optimisation can include the radiation pattern or reception pattern, or tolerance of proximity effects, or a number of other factors that will improve link reliability. Analysis modelling can assist in assessing the feasibility of product concepts without the expense and delay of experimentation with hardware, such as seeing whether sufficient voltage or power will be coupled into a target system, under realistic circumstances, given certain mechanical and regulatory/technical constraints.
We can perform custom antenna design, estimate radiated field strengths, determine radiation/sensitivity patterns, and analyse the near-field. Near-field analysis is of key importance for a number of very short range applications, including metal sensing and some forms of RFID.
Many antenna designs have particular constraints and functional requirements arising from the requirements of the overall product. Computer modelling can obtain the desired or optimum performance quickly and cost-effectively, help control the levels of spurious emissions, and also determine antenna impedance and matching.
Without such modelling, several iterations may be required with much adjustment and testing to obtain adequate antenna performance. Additionally, it is often important to analyse the effects on the effective antenna properties due to nearby metal objects (including casings, cabling and PCB metallisation) and, especially at higher frequencies, the effects due to the close proximity of non-metallic materials.
In addition to design and analysis, we also offer a full development service with build and test of prototypes.