Back at the Alma Mater! It was great to go back to my old stomping grounds at the University of Houston (UH). While visiting family in Houston during the holidays, I had a chance to squeeze in a visit to the place and people that had an enormous impact on my life. I made it a point to roam the halls of the engineering buildings and reflect on my time at the university. I stopped by the first lecture hall where I first learned how to program in Matlab. I sat in the computer lab where I rememb...

Two things that antenna engineers do not often hear in the same sentence: broadband and patch antennas. One of the most popular types of antennas, patch antennas, have many useful features for designers including a low-profile (they can be as thin as a few mm's) and can be directly integrated with PCB circuits and chips. As with anything in engineering, every design comes with its drawbacks. For patch antennas, the most notorious is bandwidth, where fractional bandwidths on the order of 5% i...