Need suggestions on how to do impedance matching on helical antenna? I want the antenna to be as light as possible so not going towards the balun right now. using a resistance may decrease the efficiency. Please guide
Matching with a resistor always wastes more power in the resisitor than the power that would have been reflected, so unless the reflected power causes a problem somewhere else and there is no other way of stopping it, don't use a resistor.
I agree with Malcom. Never use resistor for impedance matching. Of course the measurement shows "perfect" impedance, but the antenna doesn´t radiates at all.I don´t know what type of helical antenna are you talking about. If it is a NMHA (diameter much less than wavelengh) the correct groundplane can help to increase the radiation resistance (these antennas has very very low radiation reistance, near few ohms). If you are talking about axial mode or conical mode ( each turn equal or greater than a wavelengh) probably a tap conection will help in impedance matching. A very useful tool is the 4NEC2. It is free for education and personal use. It is not a proffesional electromagnetic simulator, but helps a lot in all these stuff.
I do agree with Prof. Lema and Prof. White, that never use resistance for impedance matching. Actually, mismatch loss can be calculated using commercial software, so it will be easy to analyze the antenna matching impedance.