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Many antenna designs bear the names of their developers, but few names have become so thoroughly a part of radio language as "Yagi." Perhaps the ultimate tribute to that man who probably was the first to use parasitic elements in directive arrays is that his invention is often spelled "yagi," now essentially a generic term in the antenna dictionary.
Professor Yagi, a quiet man who gave much of the credit for practical development of his ideas to his assistants, Uda and Okabe, died of heart complications in Tokyo, January 19, at the age of 89.
Though the Yagi-Uda work with parasitic arrays was done in the early 1920s, it appeared to have received little notice in this country until 1928, when Yagi visited the US and presented papers before meetings of the Institute of Radio Engineers in NY, Boston, and Hartford.
It may come as a surprise to modern amateur antenna experimenters to learn that development of parasitic arrays was only part of Professor Yagi's extensive research and development program, carried out on the UHFs at the College of Engineering of the Imperial University, Sendai, Japan in 1926 and earlier.
While Uda worked on antennas, Okabe was busy on the development of means for generating power at frequencies as high as 2500 MHz. The had split-anode magnetrons working on wavelengths from 200 cm to 12 cm, and much of the antenna work was done around 40 cm.
The Yagi papers, 'IRE Proceedings,' June, 1928, remarkably complete and advanced for their time, still make interesting reading. They were given fulsome praise by the late Dr. J. H. Dellinger, long-time chief of the Radio Division of the US Bureau of Standards, himself one of America's distinguished pioneer radio physicists: "Never have I listened to a paper that I felt so sure was destined to become a classic."
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Jeff KH6O / 6