[HCARC] "Antennas on A Chip"

[Kerry Sandstrom]

Fred,

The government bought a bunch of those B&W antennas.  I'm sure the spec 
was for broadband SWR.  the gain was probably not even specified.  It 
was about -6 dB, probably not much worse than the real gain of other 
broadband antennas.

In my lab days one of our researchers was working on a detector for the 
vector potential associated with an electromagnetic source.  One of the 
problems is the detector was overwhelmed by any electromagnetic fields.  
Our challenge was to design and build an "antenna" that wouldn't 
radiate!  Heaven only knows what people made of that work!

The academic world is driven by "publish or perish" so a lot of stuff 
that should never be published is.  A lot of researchers/small companies 
are looking for stuff to patent.  Unfortunately our current patent 
system is broke.  A lot of stuff gets patented that should never have 
been.  The companies then try to claim infringement on their patent and 
the lawyers get rich.  The validity of the patent is left up to the 
courts to decide.  Unfortunately a letter or paper in a professional 
journal has little to do with reality.  I am aware (actually, much more 
than aware) of a series of papers that appeared over a ten year period 
of time in a peer reviewed technical publication.  It turned out that 
the original premise was bogus!  Who knows how much research money was 
squandered on that premise.  Another case is the British medical 
journal, The Lancet.  The Lancet has a section that is unreviewed 
letters.  Often you will see these letters quoted in newspapers, 
magazines and news shows.  In reality, it is unlikely that most of these 
letters could ever get published if there was a peer review.

One of my fondest memories was debating with another co-worker about 
which one of us was assigned to the dumbest project.  He finally became 
part of my project at which point he turned to me and said, "You win."  
I don't think our chief ever figured out what we were debating!

Just because it is in a technical journal and on the the internet 
doesn't mean it is real.

Kerry



On 4/10/2015 4:23 PM, Fred wrote:
> Some years back a friend and I wrote an article for our local club newsletter for the April issue, on a "Futuristic All-band Kinetic Emitter" antenna.  This antenna in less than one cubic foot of space would work 1.8 to 30 MC.  It used a DC electric motor to quickly rotate the S shaped dipole element and "sling" the RF signal off giving it greater coverage.  In the receive mode it turned in the opposite direction thus "sucking" the signals in for better reception.  It was built by F.A.K.E. Industries (after the name of the antenna) and we advertised it for only $395 dollars as the startup special when production started.  We did receive one order with a check to get on the waiting list, the person ordering it wanted a small 160 meter antenna.  There's one born every day . One might take a close look at the B&W dipole which has a 100 watt 50 ohm resistor across the feed point.  No wonder it has a good SWR, it just does not radiate very good.
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