A novel helix-monopole antenna is proposed which combines the helix and monopole together to form improved current distribution. The current magnitudes are computed with Moment Method (MM) and results show the current difference between helix-monopole and helix antenna. Two antennas are fabricated for comparison and measured on the same two-way portable radio with frequency band from 400-420 MHz. Measurements prove that the proposed antenna offers a significant improvement in gain.

It has been shown that the output information produced by the soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA) is too optimistic. To compensate for this, the output information should be normalized. This letter proposes a simple normalization technique that extends the existing sign difference ratio (SDR) criterion. The new normalization technique counts the sign differences between the a-priori information and the extrinsic information, and then adaptively determines the corresponding normalization factor for each data block. Simulations comparing the new technique with other well-known normalization techniques show that the proposed normalization technique can achieve about 0.2 dB coding gain improvement on average while reducing up to about 1/2 iteration for decoding.