Re: Helical in HFSS
Hi,
For drawing the Helical Antenna, in HFSS from the main menu, you can choose:
Draw -> User Defined Primitives -> SysLib -> SegmentedHelix
Another way to design it would be using Antenna Design Kit provided by Ansoft. That makes it really easy and it can be obtained from their website.
As for calculating the pitch, it really depends on the characteristics of your antenna and whether you want the antenna to operate in normal(broadside) mode or axial(endfire) mode. For normal mode changing the pitch value results in the antenna changing from being circularly to elliptically polarized to linearly polarized. For axial mode, pitch should be large fraction of the wavelength to achieve circular polarization. One suggestion would be to have the pitch equal to quarter wavelength for axial mode.
I hope this helps.
Joline