Comparison of Measured and Simulated Radiation from 5G Cellphone Antennas with Hand Phantoms

Abstract

In this manuscript, hand effects on cellphone antennas at 5G millimeter-wave frequencies are evaluated through measurements using hand phantoms and are compared with results from electromagnetic simulations. First, two configurations of a dual-polarized 4-element linear antenna array operating at 28 GHz are introduced. One-hand and two-hand physical phantoms and their numerical models for electromagnetic simulations are illustrated. Then, the array evaluation metric, i.e., spherical coverage, is introduced to assess statistics of realized gain across the solid angle. Next, antenna measurement setups are implemented for the two antenna arrays combined with the two physical hand phantoms. Finally, the spherical coverage and the corresponding cumulative distribution function are calculated. Differences in the realized gains derived from simulated and measured antenna arrays are about 1 dB at the median levels of the cumulative distribution. The differences are comparable to those observed when real hands are used in measurements instead of phantom hands [1].