A Benchmark Biconical Antenna for Standardized Antenna Measurement and Simulation: Contribution to IEEE P2816

The IEEE Antennas and Propagation Standards Committee (APS/SC), sponsored by the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S), is currently developing a recommended practice for the modeling and simulation of antennas, IEEE P2816. It describes standardized procedures using well-known computational electromagnetics techniques for the numerical modeling of antennas in free space. It further includes benchmark problems to help potential users of the recommended practice to better understand the limitations of these computational techniques. A biconical antenna is proposed as a benchmark problem for both numerical simulations and measurements. Several laboratories have participated in the international inter-laboratory comparison of numerical simulation results of the biconical antenna. To confront the theoretical and numerical results with measurements, the same biconical antenna was proposed for fabrication and a complementary inter-laboratory measurement campaign. Herein, the fabrication and initial measurements of the prototype biconical antenna are discussed.