Where Are The Antennas?
To The Editor:
There is a great deal to like about the coverage in your magazine, although one cannot help but notice the preponderance of articles on oscillators. Certainly, I applaud the depth of coverage on signal sources. But it would appear, just from a cursory review of recent issues, that the editors of Microwaves & RF have been negligent in covering one important system component: the antenna. Without the antenna, there can be no communications, no transmission, and no reception. And antennas now come in all shapes and sizes, from the familiar large parabolic dishes of satellite communications systems to tiny embedded, printed antennas.

I would urge the editors of your magazine to seek out more articles on antenna design for 2009, since it has been an area of microwave design that has been largely ignored. In fact, I would even encourage your making readers aware of some excellent educational resources currently available on the topic, including the recently released Modern Antenna Handbook, edited by Constantine Balanis and published by John Wiley & Sons. This is not for casual reading, or for a weekend’s catching up on technology. This is a serious volume on antennas, with 1680 pages and coverage of almost every imaginable antenna type, including waveguide aperture antennas, microstrip antennas, reflector antennas, spirals, logperiodic antennas, leaky-wire antennas, traveling-wave antennas, fractal antennas, and smart antennas and arrays. It reviews the antennas as well as the structures related to them, such as feeds and screens, and runs down the various applications for the different types of antennas. It also details various methods for analyzing antenna designs, including integral equations, the method of moments (MoM), finite-element analysis, and the use of neural networks for antennas. Perhaps a call to the author might motivate you in the selection of future antenna articles.

Dr. Alan Darcon
Design Engineer
Configuration Analysis Management
Yonkers, NY