Fuzzy Antennas

There is a lot of interest these days in extremely wideband antennas. One reason is the potential for low power ultra wide band date transmissions, which would allow the transfer of massive amounts of data very quickly. The problem with UWB transmissions is that a normal antenna is only resonant at one frequency and near resonant over a narrow band of frequencies. What is needed is an antenna that is resonant on the whole of the bandwidth being used. This is usually achieved by arrays of antennas each covering a portion of the total band in use.

What is needed did not exist until recently but answer are being sought. The main contender in this field is fractal antennas, which I have mentioned briefly before in this blog. Fractal antennas exhibit wideband characteristics probably due to the fact that within their complex structure electrical lengths exist from almost the atomic level through to... well however long it is you make them.

This got me to thinking does the system actually need to use fractals at all? We hear a lot about fuzzy logic would not a fuzzy antenna have similar wideband characteristics? I mean a real fuzzy antenna. Look at a length of wool, it may be a metre long but within that length there is nearly every length of stand in between and at some point down the length there is one of those strands sticking out, this is the fuzziness. Now imagine we did this with an antenna, surely it would exhibit those wanted wide band characteristics.

Now I know some of you reading this will be thinking okay he has lost the plot, but without people thinking outside the box we would never discover new things. To prove my theory I am constructing a dipole antenna which should be resonant from 3.5MHz through to 10GHz. I have purchased 200 balls of wire wool and my mother is knitting it as we speak. It should be finished testing by the end of March and hopefully if it is as big a success as we suspect we will hold a press conference on 1st April 2011.