A half-volume quadrature TEM coil high field (>3 T) imaging applications. This novel coil produces a sufficiently large homogeneous B.sub.1 field region for the use as a volume coil. It provides superior transmission efficiency, resulting in significantly lower power deposition, as well as greater sensitivity and improved patient comfort and accessibility compared with conventional full-volume coils. Additionally this coil compensates the RF penetration artifact that distorts high-field images recorded with linear surface and volume coils. These advantages make it potentially possible to apply the device as an efficient transmit/receive body coil at high fields, where the use of the full-volume coils is complicated by the excessive power deposition and low sensitivity.