Antenna Education Needed

[ChristineBCW]

...desensitized and even burn up.

Watch up, TH! Don't give me more ideas for "101 Ways To Abuse Yer Husband". The man you save may not be yours, but he's still One Of You Guys.

(hah! As if I am not way over that "101" limit!)

 

[TonyH]

Hello, OP,
Have you any experience with antenna design, manufacture, field work? Or just playing with little dinky router sticks? What kind of experiment have you performed? Splash? More likely scatter is proper word in this case. Antenna is kazillion LC finite component chained together for a certain length. Do you understand such thing as fly wheel effect in RF amp. feeder line like coax, impedance matching, SWR, erp, etc. to begin with? Without basics, no sense going into high math, virtual stuff like quantum theory. It is difficult to understand theory without experience. At least I have experience
in my working days with antennas for frequency range from LW to MW.

 

[stevech]

Antenna design is half engineering and half art, where the latter comes only with lots of practical experience.

 

[ChristineBCW]

TH, no, I'm completely unworthy of great engineers. I just participated in my first Ubiquiti installation 5 weekends ago and certainly the high-math might explain all but, for now, fiddling with products is going to be the extent of my experience.

 

[ChristineBCW]

Antenna design is...half art...

Hubby uses this accusation when he sees me up in curlers! "You get UHF on those things?" Never EVER ask me why I abuse him.

 

[stevech]

Hubby uses this accusation when he sees me up in curlers! "You get UHF on those things?" Never EVER ask me why I abuse him.

The more usual question is: "Can you get police calls with that?"

 

[ChristineBCW]

Police calls?!! Heavens... as long as I keep him bound and gagged and chained to the dungeon walls, I don't even have to worry about him breaking out of those windows and screaming at bystanders for help again.

Boy, that was an embarrassing... He is always causing problems for me!

 

[azazel1024]

Just a nit, the RF waves don't travel down the antenna, the photons strike the antenna and induce an electric current in it.

 

[TonyH]

TH, no, I'm completely unworthy of great engineers. I just participated in my first Ubiquiti installation 5 weekends ago and certainly the high-math might explain all but, for now, fiddling with products is going to be the extent of my experience.

Hi,So you climbed tower? How high? I used to climb 180' MW tower with Filipino riggers in a war zone. I think it is proper we talk as techs/engineers
rather than researchers/scientists. May I give you a home work? make a 3 element Yagi-Uda on a copper clad blank PCB with Exacto knife and soldering iron and connect a proper coax with connector, try it on your router. When you are done show us the piece.... for 2.4 GHz or 5GHz band. Fiddling with your own stuff is better than some one else's.

 

[TonyH]

Hubby uses this accusation when he sees me up in curlers! "You get UHF on those things?" Never EVER ask me why I abuse him.

Hi,
UHF, SHF or EHF?

 

[stevech]

Just a nit, the RF waves don't travel down the antenna, the photons strike the antenna and induce an electric current in it.

what is all this photon talk? Is it satire?

 

[azazel1024]

what is all this photon talk? Is it satire?

???

Not understanding the question. Radio waves are composed of photons.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
I am a class of '60. In my days in school photon was never known or mentioned in E-M wave
study. ????? Radio wave is not light wave, much longer wave length.

 

[azazel1024]

A photon is a photon is a photon. Whether it is ocillating at 1Hz or 1PHz, it is still a photon.

Radiowaves are made of photons, just like Infrared, Visibile light, UV, X-Ray, etc. It is also a matter of the frequency/energy of the photon.

That said, I've found most people in a non-technical (by this I am refering to talking about it in respect to discussing physics) don't think about/consider/sometimes even know that radio waves are still photons. A lot of people think of photons as only visible light. Not. All electromagnetic radiation is photons.

 

[stevech]

Well, RF engineers in my extensive career, never talk about photons.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
Really. When I took quantum mechanics as part of astronomy class, I became to realize photon and EM wave relationship, particle and wave duality. But when I work in the field I think wave not photon.

 

[azazel1024]

Sure, but radio waves are still photons, even if, typically, it is more to the point to think in terms of wave nature rather than particle nature of photons, thus thinking more in terms of EM waves.

 

[stevech]

photons and quantum physics... no effect on design/build/test wireless data systems, narrow-band, wideband, microwave, that I ever encountered in decades of work.

Curious, but just a tangent.

 

[azazel1024]

If not for photons, radio waves wouldn't exist (and you couldn't see).

For quantum physics, those are taken in to account in a lot of transistor and RF design (things like electron tunneling).

Might not be things you've ever really considered, but they are all a part of it, even if not on the scale of design/test/build for RF systems.

 

[sfx2000]

Well, RF engineers in my extensive career, never talk about photons.

agreed - but I'm happy to watch this discussion about magical bits hitting antennas directly

Wavefronts and paths, along with reflectivity... and gain/patterns... it's an art, with some science, but like you, I've never heard of an RF/Antenna design engineer refer to "photons"