[Ham-80211] "Commodity Class Phased Array Antennas" for HSMM?

[David Young]

If you are interested in steerable antennas for HSMM:

P.R. Kumar at UIUC told me about a presentation Jim Kajiya gave at the
Microsoft Mesh Summit, called "Commodity-class Phased Array Antennas".
Kajiya estimates a $5 bill of materials for a software-steerable antenna
manufactured from a printed circuit board, an alumina dielectric,
and a voice coil.  I'm seeking opinions whether this is something
that a hobbyist could build affordably.  Seems to me that the hard
part would be to create the design for the patch antenna, but you
only have to do it once.  Kumar seemed to think that a loudspeaker
would serve as the voice coil.  Kajiya's presentation is listed at
<http://research.microsoft.com/meshsummit/techprogram.aspx>.  Note that
his inscrutable PowerPoint slides are mis-linked under the preceding
header.  The video is 38MB huge, but well worth a look.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933