Convert 2x2D to 3D Antenna Radiation Pattern Using AMAN in Winprop

Smit Baua_20523
Smit Baua_20523 New Altair Community Member
edited December 2021 in Altair HyperWorks

WinProp is a comprehensive and leading simulation tool in the domain of wireless propagation and radio network planning. Winprop relies on accurate wave propagation models to predict the  path loss between two arbitrary points. Besides the shielding of objects and multipath propagation, the antenna patterns of the antennas used for the communication link influence the actual path loss. Therefore, the antenna pattern must be described accurately within Winprop.

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In some cases where the antennas are not designed in-house or standard antennas available in the market are used, information on antenna characteristics is not found in expected formats. To convert the available transmitter information to Winprop readable format users can use Antenna Manager (AMan) that is part of Winprop installation.

The most important features of AMan are:

  • Graphical display of antenna patterns (horizontal or vertical plane)
  • 3D Display of antenna patterns
  • Conversion of commercially available antenna file formats (for example, .msi, .pln)
  • Conversion from 2x2D pattern (horizontal and vertical) to 3D pattern
  • Graphical editor to define manually vertical and horizontal antenna patterns (drawn with a mouse while having a scanned bitmap of the pattern as a background image)

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In this blog, we will focus on converting 2X2D antenna patterns to one 3D radiation pattern that can be accepted for ProMan simulations. The radiation patterns in the horizontal and in the vertical plane are available for nearly all commercial antennas, whereas full 3D patterns are not always available as they are more complicated to be measured. AMan offers four different conversion algorithms. The user can decide which algorithm should be used.

  1. Arithmetic Mean (AM) Algorithm
  2. Bilinear Interpolation (BI) Algorithm
  3. Weighted Bilinear Interpolation (WBI) Algorithm
  4. Horizontal Projection Interpolation (HPI) Algorithm

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It is recommended to refer to the user manual for details on each of the above algorithms. A complete section of the user manual is based on numerical evaluations to test the accuracy of the above algorithms.

The detailed steps  to convert 2x2D patterns to a 3D pattern are demonstrated in the attached video. Please reach out to Altair support for more details and questions.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pFXtVYEm_k


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