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xraystyle04/23/20252 repliesview on HN

This comment really sums it up well. Literally everything with antenna design is a trade-off. You can design an antenna to radiate very well at a given wavelength. The better it is at doing this, the worse it tends to be at every other wavelength. You can make an antenna that radiates to some degree across a wide array of wavelengths, but it's not actually going to work very well across any of them.

Same thing with radiation patterns. You can make a directional antenna that has a huge amount of gain in one direction. The trade-off is that it's deaf and dumb in every other direction. (See a Yagi-Uda design, for instance.)

Physics is immutable and when it comes to antenna design there really is no such thing as free lunch. Other than coming up with some wacky shapes I don't really think AI is going to be able to create any type of "magic" antenna that's somehow a perfect isotropic radiator with a low SWR across some huge range of wavelengths.


Replies

quesera04/23/2025

> perfect isotropic radiator with a low SWR across some huge range of wavelengths

Fair analysis -- but of course, there are industries where a funky and expensive radiator optimized for a single frequency could be very worthwhile.

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buescher04/23/2025

There's always a market for a better free lunch.