Analysis of antenna structures assembled from arbitrarily located straight wires

Pocklington's integral equation for a straight, slim wire element is solved for the distribution of wire current, using the Bubnov-Galerkin projective method. Interpolation polynomials are employed as approximators, and special weighted Gaussian quadratures are used to avoid difficulties in the near-singular integrals encountered. It is shown that Kirchhoff's current law, applied wherever several such wire segments are electrically connected, leads to a modification of the approximating matrix equation by elementary row and column operations. Computer programs based on this method are used to analyse several different types of wire antenna, and the results are compared with experimental data. Agreement is generally good, and computing times pleasingly low, indicating that this method is likely to be generally preferable to point-matching methods that lead to much larger matrix sizes.