Sci-fi inspired antenna adjusts to signal needs

spectrum.ieee.org

54 points·rbanffy··8 comments

A different idea based on time-varying antennas, but I've always wondered about the interesting technical challenges behind building a phased array antenna from a bunch of flying drones.

Your main challenge will probably be measuring the distance between neighboring drones as accurately as possible. AIUI you could recover signal from unevenly spaced receptors IFF you know precisely where each receptor is.

After that it's just a standard computational problem which is (IMO) far less interesting.

You also have to synchronise to a fraction of the wavelength so that's going to be very difficult too with everything moving around.

Ps maybe that's what you meant too

Well, I was thinking that for GHz level signals, you can't just beam your stuff down to a ground station due to bandwidth limitations, so your drones can't be just dumb ADCs, and there would need to be some compute on board. Time synchronization also becomes interesting.

Not very practical, imo:

1. antennas must withstand major changes of ambient temperatures, direct sunlight, humidity and many other factors. How would one maintain nitinol in desired shape? Which prompts the next question:

2. how does it maintain efficiency? the heating needs energy, so antenna won't be passive - okay. But motorized lifting mechanism that only draws power when change of shape is happening might be a better idea.

Would be interesting to use in electronic warfare scenarios.

Dynamic antennas? maybe grow antennas for specific wavelengths? also is it possible to have a live two-way interference correction,

Very clever. I hope there aren't too many engineering issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com