Abstract
There are many examples of surface coils that have been designed for field strengths in the range of 1.5T to 3T. However, there are few that have been designed for use at 7T which can provide high SNR and high quality images. Up until now the majority of RF coils have been designed as near field antennas. These coils produce a large magnetic field in the near field region [1]. But there is a major problem; as frequency increases the wavelength becomes shorter than the dimensions of a sample volume. This makes it difficult to generate a uniform radio frequency over a sample volume of interest. The aim of this work was to design and build a transmit/receive dipole antenna for imaging the human pelvis