Impacts of human body on built-in GPS antennas for mobile terminal in multipath environment

The portable GPS mobile terminal antennas experience multipath effects as the environmental objects in the vicinity cause the incident radio waves to reflect, diffract and scatter. Therefore, the GPS antenna's performance in real working environment cannot be judged on the basis of traditional electromagnetic analysis of the free space antenna parameters. Moreover, the mobile terminal GPS antennas operate in the proximity of the human body and have to comprehend the combined effect of the multipath wave arrival and losses in the body tissues. A novel statistical approach for the characterisation of the environmental factors on the GPS antennas has been proposed by Ur Rehman et al. [4], defined by the parameters of GPS Mean Effective Gain (MEG
GPS
), GPS Angle of Arrival (AoA
GPS
) distribution and GPS Coverage Efficiency (η
c
). This paper looks into the GPS antenna performance in the multipath environment while operating near human head and hand considering different antennas in various on-body scenarios.