When you think of satellite communications, you probably think of a dish. But that’s not the only option — a new device from the American University of Beruit and Stanford created a portable antenna made of woven materials that packs easily, weighs little, and can reconfigure for ground-to-space or ground-to-ground communications. The antenna reminded us of a finger trap and you can see it for yourself in the video below.
Because of the antenna’s construction, it can fold up and also adjust to different lengths for different purposes. The antenna collapses to a ring that is five inches across and 1 inch tall. The weight? Under two ounces. The actual paper in Nature Communications is available to read online.
Stretched out to about a foot, the antenna is omnidirectional. The size, of course, also changes the resonant frequency. Tuning is no problem, though, since you can easily change the size as needed. The antenna may also find use on satellites where it’s low weight, and compact storage would be a definite advantage.
The antenna’s weave is actually two separate helixes, one conductive and the other insulating. The antenna normally operates in a vertical configuration. It looks like it might be simple to make some version of this without anything exotic. Let us know if you try!
Helical antennas aren’t new, but this is an unusual construction. They are popular as satellite antennas because of their polarization characteristics among other things.
ITYM American University of Beirut.
It’s a novel construction of a quadrifiliar helix as far as I can tell. We made something like this to be collapsible for camping so we could get APT.
Very clever.
seems to me to be nothing more than an over-the-air antenna which cost me about $40 years ago..this is prob same but more more money..still OTA progaming
This is not a TV antenna…
Here I would attach the yt with Data and the chineese finger trap. But I don’t know how.
Now, if only we had affordable yet powerful software available to model and optimize a design like this. If only…
Off to see if I can buy a metal Slinky / plastic Slinky pair of similar diameter…
We worked with this design for TV reception in the 1970’s !
I see a lot of problems with this design. It’s always polarized, fine for satellite, not so for ground communication. Also, does this really take less space than a collapsible whip antenna and a plate antenna for 🛰️? I really can’t imagine so.