Winter 2025 Course Journal: EECS 330¶

Course Title: Intro to Antennas

Motivation¶

I'm a ham radio operator… but at what cost? Truth be told I didn't have a lot of fun on my Baofeng UV-5R. The passion wears off. The exams are not challenging, just tedious, with a focus on the "what" rather than the "why". Therefore, I enrolled in this course to find out.

Before the midterm¶

Despite being an intro to antennas, antennas didn't show up until halfway in. The first half was about plane waves, such as propagation in lossless/lossy media and normal/oblique reflection/transmission.

Honestly it's kind of boring.

Labs¶

There are two types of labs: actual equipment and computer simulation (using Ansys HFSS). The actual ones are as fun as are tedious. HFSS, on the other hand, is just tedious.

Once we had to roll a aluminum ball off a slope and measure its speed with a Doppler radar. It was ridiculous. I had expected that, since we were to make a calibration curve relating frequency shift to speed, the speed of the ball would be precisely controlled. Nope. It was a wooden slope with an arbitrary angle, with markings every 2 cm drawn with a pencil. The ball was released from the slope by hand. I would trust the Doppler radar more than my hands thank you very much.

On the next actual lab, we had fancy equipment like an RF signal generator, an amplifier, and a power detector, each of which somehow requires a different DC voltage. The power detector outputs a voltage, which we could read from a multimeter. The voltage was fluctuating all the time; just pick a random sample. The only way to relate voltage to power is readinfg off a curve on a datasheet by eye; cope. Worse, the power is in dBm and we need to convert that to mW.

The HFSS labs are just following instructions to make 3D models to simulate antennas. Here's the radiation pattern of a dipole: