Performance Analysis of Normal Mode Helical Antenna in Seawater

Recently, seawater communication has become an increasingly important technology as underwater application devices are growing rapidly. Thus, this paper presents a normal mode helical antenna (NMHA) application for divers using a device to device concept. Novelty of this research is that NMHA is applied in seawater, as previous works have not mentioned using it. As the propagation loss in seawater is very high, lower operational frequency is used for better antenna performances. The development of antenna for seawater application using VHF range frequency is implemented by using NMHA as a communication antenna, due to its small size and better performance. The antennas were designed using FEKO, an electromagnetic simulation software. Simulation results show results were almost identical to the theoretical results, hence the NMHA can be used for seawater application.