Old Marconi Patent Inspires Tiny New Gigahertz Antenna

Posted by samzenpus on Monday April 20, 2015 @06:43AM from the getting-small dept.

agent elevator writes Gehan Amaratunga and a group of engineers in England noted that the Guglielmo Marconi's famous British patent application from 1900 had an interesting and little noticed detail. It depicted a transmitter linked to an antenna connected to a coil, which had one end dangling while the RF signal was fed to the middle of the coil. That detail inspired them to develop a way to reduce the size of a GHz antenna without significant transmission loss by using dielectrics as the radio wave emitting material instead of conductors.

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My B.S. Detector is Going Off by Bruce+Perens · 2015-04-20 07:01 · Score: 5, Informative

Marconi's connection to the center tap of a coil with one end not connected worked by broken symmetry? Really? It wasn't just a method of tuning a coil to the correct reactance for a particular frequency?

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Bruce Perens.
Obviously by Anonymous Coward · 2015-04-20 07:05 · Score: 5, Funny

This means that Guglielmo Marconi's hard work was stolen without compensation and he has no incentive to invent anymore. Extends patents to 115 years!