Antennas quietly infiltrate our daily lives – there are at least four in your mobile phone and two in your computer – and Maltese researchers are working to design one antenna capable of integrating them all.
Traditionally, the shapes and forms of antennas are designed to work optimally at one frequency, so for example, a car radio antenna is typically useless at receiving TV broadcasts and similarly the average TV antenna cannot be used to extend your home Wi-Fi network.
However, the antenna being designed by scientists from the University of Malta’s Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy (ISSA) is challenging all this and, once operational, it will be capable of working over a large range of frequencies and used for TV, wireless, Bluetooth and near-field communications.
Sponsored through the Technology Development Programme of the Malta Council for Science and Technology, this project has tapped into Machine Learning – a type of artificial intelligence that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed – to shape antennas so that they can work across different frequency bands.
“The idea is to have a single antenna that can work across all frequencies, but for the applications we’re looking to exploit we also wanted the antenna to be printable, and more importantly flexible,” Kristian Zarb Adami, ISSA founder and the project’s principal investigator, said.
An application being developed is to have these antennas printed on parking bays to inform drivers which spots are free
“This means it can be printed on different surfaces, such as the surface of your laptop, your T-shirt, the car’s exterior, or wrapped around the fuselage of an aircraft.”
The requirement for antennas to perform over such broad ranges comes from the fact that ISSA researchers are trying to detect the first atoms and molecules that were formed at the earliest stages of the universe.
Originating from some 400 million years after the Big Bang, these signals are by no means easy to measure so astronomers are building the world’s largest telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which will be capable of detecting signals from 80MHz (close to where your car radio works) all the way up to 1.4GHz (close to where your GPS antennas work).
The SKA is a global collaboration and, when finished in 2025, will cover large parts of the Australian desert, a place so remote that it has 35 inhabitants in an area the size of Holland.
“Building and deploying antennas in such remote locations is a very expensive business which is why we’re working on inventing an antenna which can cover wide bandwidths, be printed like a newspaper and then rolled out like a carpet,” Prof. Zarb Adami said.
However, although this antenna has been designed for radio astronomy, the researchers have been contacted by several companies that are developing applications for the Internet of Things – a network of physical devices capable of collecting and exchanging data automatically.
“One fascinating example was to put an antenna in rodent traps so that, once a rodent is trapped, the trap communicates with a central station so that the rodent can be released before it dies,” he added.
Another application being developed is to have these antennas printed on parking bays to inform drivers which spots are free.
“We are now working on prototyping this antenna to ensure a seamless performance.
“The technological spin-offs from this are endless,” Prof. Zarb Adami said.