hckrnws

Expected pictures of origami shaped antennas, but found a scientific article instead. It's clickbait. ;)

Newsletter author here- i literally made my 9 year old make an origami fortune teller for the title cover image. Tried to deliver on the promise! :)

Cool stuff, this kind of phased array antenna is also how modern radars work without moving parts.

Did you read the article? This type of phased array has a rather large number of moving parts, including a number of folding GHz transmission lines. Personally, I'm very skeptic whether we'll ever see this design outside of bespoke high performance applications.

The fact that this is very cool doesn't change the huge advantage classic planar phased arrays have by literally having zero moving parts.

Which part of the array is movable, exactly?

The article did not describe a movable array. There are folds, sure, but they seem entirely static. And the only time it was even mentioned is when deploying it via satellites (unfolding the array into a particular configuration).

To quote the section "Eggbox Phased Array":

> This unit cell, like an origami design, may be folded across either axis or laid flat, allowing you to physically change the direction of radiation. Because the phased array antenna on each face can steer the beam further, the antenna can be utilized to generate almost any radiation pattern using a combination of physical folding and electronic beam steering.

To me "physically change the direction of radiation" is rather explicit that the antenna isn't static.

Also:

> When you see a foldable circuit running at 28 GHz, the first thing you think about is the foldable interconnect's RF performance and stability over repeated folding...The result is a stable hinge design that does maintains low loss over the 180° range of folding, and shows no degradation up to 300 folds.

This is very clearly intended to be physically reconfigurable.

Newsletter author here-

Agree moving parts suck. But they are interesting in fold up, deploy and unfurl in mini satellite applications perhaps

This is extremely academic. Reinventing flex circuits on a 3D printer??

AFAICT they built exactly one "unit cell" and there's no way that SPI interconnect scales to an array

[dead]