ARLA/CLUSTER: Entrevista a Nathan Cohen W1YW sobre a Antena Fractal.

[João Costa > CT1FBF]

Nathan Cohen W1YW was interviewed about his Fractal Antenna for a TV
show, Hunting the Hidden Dimension, now available to watch online.

In the show he says:

I was at an astronomy conference in Hungary, and Dr. Mandelbrot was
giving a talk about the large-scale structure of the universe, and
reporting how using fractals is a very good way of understanding that
kind of structure, which really wowed the entire group of astronomers.

He showed several different fractals that I, in my own mind, looked at
and said, "Oh, wouldn't it be funny if you made an antenna out of that
shape. I wonder what it would do."

I thought back to the lecture and said, "Well, I've got a piece of
wire, what happens if I bend it?" After I bent the wire, I hooked it
up to the cable and my ham radio, and I was quite surprised to see
that it worked the first time out of the box. It worked very well. And
I discovered that—much of a surprise to me—that I could actually make
the antenna much smaller, using the fractal design. So it was,
frankly, an interesting way to beat a bad rap with the landlord.

Using fractals, experimentally, I came up with a very-wide-band
antenna, and then I worked backwards and said, "Why is it working this
way? What is it about nature that requires you to use the fractal to
get there?"

The result of that work was a mathematical theorem that showed if you
want to get something that works as an antenna over a very wide range
of frequencies, you need to have self-similarity. It has to be fractal
in its shape to make it work. And that was an exact solution. It
wasn't like, "Oh, here's a way of doing it and there's a lot of other
ways of doing it." It turned out, mathematically, we were able to
demonstrate that was the only technique we could use to get there.

The 53-minute show was aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS)
and can be seen on the web at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/hunting-hidden-dimension.html

PBS have blocked the show for certain countries such as the UK but
using a US-based Proxy Server will get around it.

Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc.
http://www.fractenna.com/