Experimental verification of the 2-D rooftop approach for modeling microstrip patch antennas

Radiation pattern and input impedance measurements for a rectangular microstrip patch are used to establish the accuracy of a general moment-method approach. The approach uses two-dimensional rooftop basis functions to model arbitrarily shaped three-dimensional composite, conductor-dielectric structures. The numerical results show agreement with the measurements. However, both the experimental and theoretical results show considerable differences when compared with previously published analyses using pulse-basis functions. These differences and others cast doubts on the validity of using pulse basis functions to model scattering or radiation from composite structures.