Design of linearly polarized rectangular patch antenna using MoM, FDTD and FEM

Full wave electromagnetic field solvers have different shapes and methodologies to solve Maxwell's equations according to the problem boundary conditions and geometry. This paper compares the accuracy, memory requirements and CPU time of 3 well known full wave antenna design packages applied to the design of a linearly polarized rectangular microstrip patch antenna with a probe feed operating in the L1 band (1.575 GHz). The three full wave methods used in this study are: 1) a method of moments (MoM) solver, 2) a finite difference time domain (FDTD) solver, and 3) a finite element method (FEM) solver. Simulation results were compared with measurements from a prototype for the |S
₁₁
|, |Z
_in
|, VSWR and the bandwidth.