Antennas and the Human Body

摘要

We have been reading with much interest the Innovation column, "GNSS Antennas and Humans" (February issue). As the interaction with the human body is something many companies designing GPS into their products do not consider, it is great to see this topic being given some recent attention. We do feel, however, that we should comment on some issues we see in the article, especially as one of our antennas has been used as part of the testing. As rightly mentioned in the article, many of the products using GPS where performance close to the body is potentially an issue are consumer products. These typically are of small size or at very least have major space constraints placed on those designing them. As such it is very unlikely that they would use either a large active patch antenna or in fact an active antenna from Sarantel. In the vast majority of consumer applications, either smaller patch antennas (12 X 12 millimeters, maximum) will be used with smaller ground planes or even small chip or planar inverted-F antenna (PIFA) style antennas.