Characterization of an Eight-Element Circular Patch Array for Helical Beam Modes

This paper reports on a new method for characterizing intermodal isolation, power penalty, and reception zone area of helical beam (HB) antennas. As an example, an eight-element circular patch array is fully characterized and its performance is critically assessed. Validation through beam measurements is accompanied with precise electromagnetic modeling using conformal finite-difference time domain computation on a graphics processing unit.