Antenna radiation pattern considerations for UWB localization

The radiation pattern of the antennas used for the tags and readers in a localization system have a major effect on the system performance. Three combinations of antennas were studied and the results have been presented in this paper. It is shown that an intuitive choice of antennas for the application, based on their radiation patterns, may not always be the right decision. For example, it is shown that although a patch antenna with a broad beamwidth looks ideal for ceiling mounted readers, the good performance of the discone at larger ranges between antennas, makes it a far better choice for this application. Of course, it should be acknowledged that the discone is a 3-dimensional antenna, and so due to its weight and cost, may not favored for use in tags. However, there are many planar antennas which have been shown to have similar radiation patterns and bandwidth characteristics as the discone. Thus the results obtained using the discone and patch in this study can be extended to the case of many other low weight and low cost planar antennas.