2D to 3D modeling - antenna pattern

samcwy

I am modeling an antenna pattern from two 2D plane. One is the vertical plane and the other is the horizontal plane. Could I make use of these two plane to model back the 3d pattern as below?

Actually I do not know if it is possible. If it is not possible in sketchup, could anyone suggest any other method? Including programming method, opengl. Any comment would be appreciated

TIG

To make a 3d mesh from your two 2d 'curves' you could try Fredo's CurviLoft or my Extrusion Tools [EEbyRails?].
To 'color' it Chris Fullmer has some color-by-slope and color-by-height tools you could try later...

mac1

What you see is a typical far field principle plane pattern as taken on a far field range ( That is for reasonable sized antennas. Big ones require other approaches). The antenna is installed on a rotator and used to receive or transmit the signal to another antenna as it is rotated 360 degs. The two planes are usually obtained by rotation of the antenna by 90 degrees to get the other plane. Principle planes are done at 0,0. Two things I noticed is these are not x,y,z patterns but azimuth and elevation. Usually there is a gain reference given at the zero point so one then can have the gain for a particular azimuth and elevation location. Along with the gain ref there is usually a note stating how the pattern was taken. For true gain one must know the polarization, both transmit and receive, at a particular look direction. For what I am assuming for your case that ifo. is not needed. For a plane, spacecraft etc. that gets to be important if you can not point the antenna in the 0,0 direction.
So what you are modelling for will depend on what you need. The above and gain should be OK for novice applications. You can even est. the gain from the above pattern if you need that.

mozzie

It's difficult to provide a single solution without knowing what the format of the data is. Here's some suggestions.

if you have XYZ data (or polar co-ordinate data that can be converted) then Didier Bur's excellent pointscloud ruby script (Didier's site is http://rhin.crai.archi.fr/RubyLibraryDepot/) will import spreadsheet data and provide some level of triangulation/skinning. I use it mostly for terrain/ DEM data for which it works well.
If you have the contour data for the illustrated diagrams in digital form, then TIG's suggestions are the way to go. You may need to tweak the interpolations.
If all you have is the graphs, you could import these as images, trace each and then scale as required and follow TiG's suggestion. Another program that is good at accurately digitising images of graphs is Engauge (http://digitizer.sourceforge.net/). The interface is not slick, but its very capable.

Hope that helps.
If not, SU may not be the right tool - you may want to look at dedicated data visualisation programs. I haven't used these much, but GGOBI (http://www.ggobi.org/) integrates with the R data/statistical environment (http://cran.r-project.org/), or OpenDX seems well regarded (http://www.opendx.org/). I know nothing about Axiis (http://www.axiis.org/) but it might be another option.