In 14 June EE Times on page 55 we find an article on a new concept in
"miniaturized" antennas following are a few titilating quotes which I have
excerpted from the article. The article may be available from the EE Times
WWW site: http://www.eet.com.

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"University researcher calls distributed load monopole a radical take on old
ideas"

"A four year skunk works effort at the University of Rhode Island in
Kingston has cut the size of an antenna by as much as one third for any
frequency from the kHz to the GHz range" Using conventional components..."

"I've been able to put a combination of them [old ideas] together to create
a revolutionary way of building antennas. It uses basically a helix plus a
load coil"

"a completely planar design is less than a third the size of today's cell
phone antennas"

"And those 300 fiot tall antennas for the 900 kHz AM band that dominate the
skylines would only have to be 80 feet high"

"When looking at these antennas, you pretty much have to forget everything
you ever knew about antennas and keep an open mind, because some of the
things I have done are vey radical"

"I reduce the inductive loading that is normally required to resonate the
antenna by as much as 75%... by utilizing the distibuted capacitance around
the antenna"

"it's a two dimensional helix"

"the current at the top of the antenna is 80% of the current at the base"

"Vincent said no existing modeling software could adequately model his
antenna design. So he rolled his own simulation with Mathcad"

"Eight years ago antenna design was 90% black magic and 10% theory, said
Vincent. But now with my design they are 10% black magic and 90% theory"

etc... etc...

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Apparently Vincent received the 2004 Outstanding Intellectual Propery Award
from the University of Rhode Island's Research Office, joint applicant for
the patent.

Sounds fantastic I want one of these 90% black magic antennas for myself!

But, it smacks of the "fractal" hype, maybe it's just too good to be true?

The inventor is one Dr. Robert Vincent of the Physics department of the
University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI which apparently will share the
"pending" patent with him. Vincent is a radio amateur [No call sign given
in the EE Times article.] and claims he got the idea for his radical new
antenna designs while trying to satisfy his neighbours complaints about the
size of his 140 foot 160 meter antenna and so he ultimately came up with a
46 foot "DLM" antenna that was equally as good.

As usual with EE Times little or no technical detail was given!

Anyone know anything about this DLM antenna.

Comments, thoughts...

--
Peter K1PO
Indialantic By-the-Sea, FL