SP3L's Antennas - BMA - Broadside Monopole Array

BMA - Broadside Monopole Array

BMA is based upon BDA in which one half of the antenna is removed and replaced with a ground connection. In the model, the ground connection is approximated with a system of 16 radials 3.5 m long, lifted 0.01 m above the high accuracy average ground model. If you have a NEC-4/5 based simulator, you may model buried radials. When I was simulating these antennas, I had access to NEC-2 and MININEC simulators only.

The broadband vertical is compared to a quarter-wave monopole (maximum gain of -0.12 dBi when simulated in the same conditions).

I modeled and simulated only the 2-element BMA, but most likely the multielement BMAs would work too. However, the CEMs described in the next section seemed to me more practical than the BMAs.

2-element BMA

2-element BMA has only two parallel elements, but it features broadband operation. The radiation pattern is almost perfectly circular at 14 MHz and is only slightly deformed to an oval shape at 29.7 MHz. The difference between the broad side gain and the narrow side gain is 0.65 dB at that frequency.

Click here to download this antenna models. Please note that the MMANA-GAL model does not have radials over the ground but a direct connection to the Mininec ground.