Suggestions for simulating electrically small antennas

[laurel]

I'm working on simulating electrically small dipoles for radio astronomy. An interesting challenge I've run into is that using the FEM solver the mesh and the calculation time tends to be very large. For example, I'm driving a 800mm dipole at frequencies from 20-200MHz. To meet the 1/4 wavelenght spacing for the radiation boundary i end up with a solution space on the order of 48m3 if i were to use a spherical volume. Would using the FE-BI solver make more sense?

[Takeshi Itadani]

With FE-BI, analysis is possible even with an analysis space of approximately λ/20.

Furthermore, the analysis space does not need to be spherical; generating a mesh for the curved surfaces of a spherical analysis space is time-consuming. A rectangular parallelepiped is perfectly acceptable for the analysis space.