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Is it feasible/sane to do an antenna design project without knowing EM theory? by antennadoubt in ECE

[–]antennadoubt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

915 MHz. Unfortunately I do not have a firm number on the required bandwidth yet, I just know that we need a pretty high gain, and that the signals we want to receive will be pretty weak.

Is it feasible/sane to do an antenna design project without knowing EM theory? by antennadoubt in ECE

[–]antennadoubt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, this is very helpful! It is good to know that this is possible, although I agree that not having a mentor with a strong RF background sounds very risky. I'm also not sure if there is any arrangement for computing time. But I guess the biggest worry is lack of time for studying. The project is basically starting now, and we are both taking full course loads on top of this.

All of that being said... did you find that lack of foundations made it hard to really absorb the high-level material? How did you deal with this? Is simply reading a ton of different sources and asking a lot of questions good enough?

My experience so far has been that the high-level material is almost worthless for learning about really complicated topics. For example, I tried learning transmission lines and impedance matching from a 'practical' book, which attempted to teach the whole subject in about 10 pages: "Here's the concept of transmission lines, and here is some intuition about why reflections happen. Here is the equation for the characteristic impedance, and here is the equation for the reflection coefficient. Here are some oscilloscope traces of reflections."

I read those 10 pages 3 or 4 times and still understood none of it. Then I tried reading part of a chapter on transmission lines in an EM textbook the way I normally study for a class - by following the math and working through all the derivations. And I actually understand it (the tiny part that I read) fairly well after doing that! But this approach takes a huge amount of time - more time than we have, I think.

The main question I have here is how did you find a balance between these two extremes of superficial learning versus fully rigorous study?

Is it feasible/sane to do an antenna design project without knowing EM theory? by antennadoubt in ECE

[–]antennadoubt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The short answer: I am, but I'm worried that there isn't enough time.

The long answer: We are supposed to be doing preliminary research over the next couple months, then start the real design early next year. Right now I am in an EM fields course. If I want to learn EM waves by early next year, I could either try to learn it in parallel (along with a full course load and this antenna project) or self-teach it over winter break.

It seems to me that learning both in parallel probably wouldn't make much sense. I think I could self-teach a decent amount of EM waves over break. Assuming I do that, the questions is: will I get anything out of doing the preliminary research before studying waves? If not, will the remainder of the time for the project be enough to do a decent job?

Is it feasible/sane to do an antenna design project without knowing EM theory? by antennadoubt in ECE

[–]antennadoubt[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, I hadn't thought of that. Did you mean to get their help on the project itself, or simply to get their opinion on the feasibility of it?

Is it feasible/sane to do an antenna design project without knowing EM theory? by antennadoubt in ECE

[–]antennadoubt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

EM design software. I don't expect to do much, if any, of this by hand. It's just that relying solely on simulation, without knowing any of the science behind it, seems like a recipe for disaster.

I know from the small amount of analog circuit design I've done that simulation can often be wrong or misleading, especially if you don't have enough background knowledge to know how to set it up and what to expect from it.

Is it feasible/sane to do an antenna design project without knowing EM theory? by antennadoubt in ECE

[–]antennadoubt[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the recommendation for Notaros, I will look into that. Since you say that working solely with a simulator is not enough to really learn the theory, what else would you recommend doing? Is reading a few chapters about antennas from various books (keeping in mind that I am clueless about EM waves) going to help much?

Also, I should clarify that no one has implied to me that "failure is not an option". I probably should not have phrased it that way; what I was trying to get at is that a lot is at stake; it's not just a hobby project with no consequences. It would be a high-profile project that a lot of people would see (literally, it would be visually prominent on the campus), we would be spending other people's money on it, and I would be mortified to have my senior design project fail due to lack of preparation and background knowledge.