I once went to an antenna tuning/design/factory for my startup's product and I told the guy there, I want an antenna to support X frequencies, this that dBs, good VSWR, hopefully achieve X kilometers range, etc etc.<p>Two days later he had 3 designs of antennas ready to be made into a flexible PCB and two days after that we got the FPCB samples.<p>I was amazed so I asked to see how he works. He took copper tape, and with a boxcutter he carves the antenna, and adds solder blobs to tune with the network analyzer. Then, once he was satisfied, he shoved them into the anechoic chamber and boom, done. Black magic stuff.<p>Antenna intuition is really hard to attain, it takes years playing with the right equipment in the right environment..
There is a surprising lack of easily digestable antenna/ham radio related material on the internet. I know because it took me 3 weeks to learn the basics of antennas when I expected to finish in 2 nights. Some of the best information I read was from old Royal Canadian Airforce videos, atleast several decades old[0]<p>I still haven't been able to find a general equation for a have wavelength dipole antenna explained in simple English. I do have one based on empirical evidence, though[1]. I've even bought a copy of the ARRL Handbook, but I find that it goes from 0 to OMG-language-is-this too quickly.<p>Thank you, I wish I'd found this site earlier.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bDyA5t1ldU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bDyA5t1ldU</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/12996/what-is-the-equation-for-the-arm-lengths-of-a-half-wavelength-dipole-antenna" rel="nofollow">https://ham.stackexchange.com/questions/12996/what-is-the-eq...</a>
<i>"I am a practicing antenna engineer, with a PhD in antennas and I have worked for many years in defense, university and the consumer electronics field as an antenna engineer."</i><p>Nice that some of the "old web" soldiers on. Firsthand info from actual experts.
This is a great summary. I too have struggled to get decent information on the web about antenna theory and design. As it turned out, I was searching wrong :-) The keyword is 'electrodynamics' and the canonical text is "Classic Electrodynamics" by Jackson. I am told that if you can understand the contents of this book, antennas are pretty straight forward. I started in on it, got whacked upside the brain a number of times, then backed off to "Introduction to Electrodynamics" by Griffth which is the undergraduate version and does a bit more math review, which was essential in my case. My plan is that once I am through that I'll go back and re-start Jackson.<p>The fun bit here is that if you look for computer code to simulate this stuff you will run into a lot of Fortan code. So if you ever wanted to learn Fortran this will give you some code to puzzle over.
As a physicist rather than an EE (although I'm neither now), antennna always led to confusion. In particular antenna effective area and reciprocity. Trying to imagine a 1d dipole antenna funneling some 2D part of the incoming wavefront into its output waveguide just felt like magic. As did the trying to intuitively see that an antenna's gain is the same in transmission and reception when the wavefronts seem totally unequivalent. Would have liked to have really studied it more but antenna don't get covered in a typical physics course.
Andrew McNeil has a good set of videos on building 2.4 and 5 GHz antennae on youtube:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHqwzhcFOsoFFh33Uy8rAgQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHqwzhcFOsoFFh33Uy8rAgQ</a>
I have an etymological question. The chap who supervised my ham tests insists that bugs have antennae and radios have aerials. I wonder if it is a US/UK thing? He is British.
Am I overlooking something or is the "cantenna" not considered a fundamental antenna type? It does not seem to be listed in the page about different antennta types.<p>It seems to be quite easy to build once you find a suitable can (easier than a Yagi-Uda antenna) and it seems it can easily keep pace with a Yagi-Uda antenna of similar size.
It's slightly ironic that the source page cites the Einstein quote about simplicity and yet, one of the central equations of antenna link design is the "Path Loss Equation" which is in fact, simpler than possible. :)