A magnetic quadrupole pickup has recently been designed for the CERN proton synchrotron. The design is based on a new idea, where the undesired common mode signal is suppressed by coupling to the radial component of the field. One design detail is a thin resistive layer between the beam and the actual pickup structure. This layer serves to lower the longitudinal impedance, but also influences the coupling impedance of the pickup. To optimise the design, a series of simulations of the pickup structure have been performed using the HFSS program. The longitudinal impedance was determined by simulating the coaxial wiremethod, and the pickup coupling to the different field modes created by the ''beam'' was studied and optimised. In this paper, the simulations are presented together with some comparative measurements
