Had a dig around for some pictures of such antennas and found this: <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-model-4068-MHz-ac-plasma-antenna_fig4_286640009" rel="nofollow">https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-model-4068-MHz-ac-plas...</a><p>Find myself wishing such tech was prevalent during the early days of mobile phones and massive external aerials, but that's just the inner Jedi in me.
One of my university lecturers, John Rayner, worked on developing these back in the day. Managed to track down a paper he published on it which is quite interesting: <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1291644" rel="nofollow">https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1291644</a>
Does anyone know how stealth fighter aircraft are able to incorporate radar hardware that doesn't act like a giant retro reflector? Putting a radar array on the front of a stealth fighter just seems like painting a giant bullseye on it, even if it's not emitting.<p>I wonder if something like this could already be in use, since it becomes invisible to radar as soon as the plasma generator is turned off?
Going further with the idea it could be possible to make an antenna from ionized air.<p>As it turns out someone already patented "Antenna of ionized air": <a href="https://patents.google.com/patent/US2760055" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/patent/US2760055</a> The patent expired in 1973.
I'm not antenna knowledgeable nor plasma knowledgeable.<p>Is there a layman's explanation about what the advantages / why there are advantages here?<p>It talks about turning off the plasma antenna, is that any different than simply not using a regular antenna? ... or what they mean by stealth or "resistance to electronic warfare and cyber attack".
Slightly OT, but there was no image in the page, so I scrolled down to the bottom and clicked a link in the "See also" section labeled "Article with image". The article had no image of a plasma antenna. What gives, Wikipedia?
Can someone wire one to a guitar and pair it with a rydberg vapour cell as the recieving antenna, so the audiophile community can finally have something to justify their pricing.<p><a href="https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5099036" rel="nofollow">https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.5099036</a>