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What is the most difficult antenna problem you had to deal with?

rscasny


Antennas are perhaps the most difficult thing of a wireless design.

The test equipment to measure signal and radiation costs a lot of money.

Even with simulations, you still need to measure, test and refine under realistic environmental conditions.

There is no such things as a one-size-for-all antenna.

There are short range and long range, internal and external, simple and complex antennas.

If you have designed antennas or wireless solutions, what was the most difficult thing you had to deal with. (If you have an antenna horror story, we think we'd all like to hear about it.)

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  • Probably more a funny story rather than a difficult problem/design...  When I was a grad student in college we needed an antenna to receive the 10MHz WWVH signal reflected off the ionosphere.  We had just moved into a new engineering building and we built a simple half wave dipole on the roof.  Construction was straightforward but somewhat awkward because of the 15 meter span.  The only scary part was that we were 4 floors up and working next to an atrium that was open all the way to the ground.

    The antenna worked well when we initially tested it,  but after a few weeks we started experiencing severe overloading of the receiver.  It took a while to figure out, but there was a project in the Geophysics building across campus that was communicating  with a ship offshore and the line of sight of their transmission was directly across our antenna.

    I guess the moral of the story is be aware of your environment and the effect on your design, but with RF communication that's not so easy to do.  I'm amazed sometimes that things work at all...

  • in reply to ralphjy

    also a school story: in the last year we had to make a project. One of my classmates made a HF morse code sender. Another one a programmable incubator for eggs. When the HAM guy pushed his morse key, the UV lights in the incubator would switch on Laughing

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