Lateral wave propagation in the presence of a conducting plate

Lateral waves can propagate when an antenna is placed close to an interface between two different media. A study is made of how the lateral wave is affected by a conducting plate placed parallel to the interface. This changes the type of decay of the wave along the interface from that of algebraic to exponential. A new method is used in developing the formulas. Impedance boundary conditions are used to decouple the two media at each step of an iterative procedure. Single medium techniques can then be used in each region. The formulas are seen to agree well with numerical results from the exact integral representations of the fields.