New Research Weaves Omnidirectional Antennas Into Clothing
Antennas are a bit like like underwear. Everybody needs them, but you generally want to conceal them, and when you have troubles with them, it gets embarrassing. Ever since we lost the pull-out and nub antennas of yesteryear on our phones and radios, the antenna has been more and more integrated with the designs of devices, but sometimes it isn’t practical to do so.
Take our clothing, for instance. Generally, getting antennas to play nice with bending and reshaping has led to poor performance (and then there are these things). But work being done at Ohio State University might have taken the next big step towards creating a sweater transmitter.
They used a thin, flexible plastic substrate and etched brass onto it, forming a sort of lightweight antenna thread. They then wove this thread into four areas of a vest: front, back, and both shoulders. A controller about the size of a deck of cards was mounted on a belt. This device monitors the signal of each antenna and switches between them on the fly in order to keep those bars up. In tests, it performed far better than existing whip-style antennas. Most importantly, it allowed reliable communication regardless of the direction the person was facing.
It isn’t cheap: right now the tech costs around $200 per person to implement, which is probably out of NASA’s budget. The researchers believe they can bring the price down, and eventually integrate the antennas with normal clothes for safety purposes.