NetAntennaPlot

Case Study #8 – Antenna/Radar Plot

An Australian defense contractor had us create a specialized polar plot used in radar testing. While the customer called it a radar plot, we chose to call it an antenna plot, because in many charting packages, a radar plot is associated with a completely different style of chart. In a regular polar plot, the radial axis is scaled from a center point value of 0, to a magnitude R. In the antenna plot, the radial axis is scaled from a center plot value of (Rmin) to a maximum value Rmax. Rmin and Rmax can represent any range of real values, including negative values. So the radial axis of an antenna plot can be scaled from -40 to 20, something not possible with regular polar plots. While similar to our polar plots, sharing many of the same calculations, we needed to create the following new classes for our QCChart2D software:

AntennaScale (coordinate conversions)

AntennaAutoScale (auto-scaling for single and multiple datasets)

AntennaCoordinateSystem (manages the parametric antenna coordinate system as a sub class of our abstract PhysicalCoordinates class)

AntennaAxes (y-axis, and circular angular axis)

AntennaAxeslabels (y-axis labels, and circular angular axis labels)

AntennaGrid (radial grid lines and circular grid lines)

AntennaAnnotation (radial line and circular annotations)

AntennaLinePlot (line plot in antenna coordinates)

AntennaLineMarkerPlot (line marker plot in antenna coordinates)

AntennaScatterPlot (scatter plot in antenna coordinates)

These features have been integrated into the standard release versions of our QCChart2D for .Net, for WPF, for Silverlight, for Java and for Android products.