Assessment of the antenna mounting location on a military vehicle for jamming applications based on computational electromagnetics

The placement of an antenna on the roof of a military vehicle-mounted jamming system presents many challenges. For that, further approaches are needed to study the effectiveness of placing antennas on these vehicles. Besides, due to the cost, time, and technical difficulties in measuring the suitable antenna locations on large tactical vehicles, there is a demand for methods to compute the optimal position for antennas before installation and for jamming coverage of 360 degrees around the vehicle. In this paper, we analyze a simulation model based on an UWB (Ultra-Wideband) discone antenna placed on the roof of a MPP (Multi-Purpose Protected) military vehicle. The proposed discone antenna shows good UWB characteristics, and operates in the frequency band from 0.81 GHz to 6 GHz for a VSWR below 2:1 over the whole bandwidth. It displays a good radiation pattern behavior with a good average radiation efficiency of around 71 % when mounted on a military vehicle. In addition, the radiation pattern was compared for the stand-alone antenna in free space taking as a reference and at four locations on the roof of the military vehicles, at five frequencies. The antenna at the back of the roof of the vehicle has the most optimal results, with adequate far-field behaviors for jamming applications. The results confirm the significant advantage of an UWB discone antenna that could be installed on a military vehicle-mounted jamming system platform as an alternative potential candidate to conventional antennas. "This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-200RSY the ICMCIS, held in Skopje, North Macedonia, 16-17 May 2023".