University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering
Electrical & Computer Engineering

Broadband Antennas

Professors Harold D. Webb and Paul E. Mayes, with student Dwight Isbell Professors Harold D. Webb and Paul E. Mayes, with student Dwight Isbell 
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Established after World War II, the Antenna Lab achieved breakthroughs in antenna bandwidth, enabling the spread of television as well as advances in radio astronomy, radar, and space communications.  Most of the innovations were enabled by the then-radical idea, credited to Professor Vic Rumsey, that antennas defined by angles rather than lengths could be sized independently of their operating frequency.

By embodying Rumsey's angular concept in an array of discrete elements, Professor Raymond DuHamel (BSEE '47, MSEE '48, PhD'51) and student Dwight Isbell paved the way to "log-periodic" designs that became popular TV receivers. Today, mobile and wireless communications—with their limitless appetite for bandwidth and ever-present constraint of size—have opened up a whole new field of antenna work in which Rumsey's idea continues to play a central role.