For satellites, it used to be that dreams and big visions turned to reality after many years of development and many millions of dollars. This is no longer the case. CubeSats, a miniature-size satellite, offer an interesting paradigm shift that completely changes the design process for satellites, providing a relatively inexpensive access to space. For the traditional, expensive, and large sat...

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 l...

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. F...

Every year, the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society awards one PhD level scientist the Raj Mittra Travel Grant (RMTG). This grant was established to partially support one recent PhD graduate in attending the annual IEEE Symposium on Antennas and Propagation. Only PhD's that graduated within the last six years are eligible to apply. It is an extremely competitive grant because recently graduated ...

The IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S) hosted the annual IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation in Vancouver, BC, Canada for 2015. Each year the society holds a student paper competition at the symposium, where students worldwide are invited to submit a double-blind version of their papers to be judged by a committee of experts within the society. This year, I submi...

Recently, our group wrote an invited article on TheConversation.com about our collaboration with JPL to develop a new antenna concept for future Mars Rover missions. Our article attracted enough attention that we were invited to interview with ABC Channel 7 news. The news crew came out and interviewed each member of the UCLA group. Overall, it was an interesting experience to talk about the ex...

Jean Paul Santos, Prof. Rahmat-Samii, and I were invited to write a feature article for a news featured on an online news organization sourced from the academic and research community, The Conversation. Through a collaboration with JPL engineers, we were able to prototype a 4×4 subarray antenna with excellent measured results, potentially allowing its use for the upcoming Mars2020 mission. This wa...

The annual IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation (IEEE APS) conference was held in Vancouver, BC, Canada for the year 2015. While I was excited about travelling to an awesome city with great latte's, I was even more excited about presenting some of my recent work on CP antenna designs. The grand challenge inherent to CP antennas is to satisfy two performance requirements sim...

I am excited to announce my latest journal paper entitled "Design and Implementation of Broadband MEMS RHCP/LHCP Reconfigurable Arrays Using Rotated E-Shaped Patch Elements" with co-authors Harish Rajagopalan and Yahya Rahmat-Samii. This paper describes our development of a wideband antenna design that can switch between right-handed and left-handed circular polarization states, increasing the...

Over the last year, I have been collaborating with Prof. Rahmat-Samii on a project with JPL related to the characterization of radiation in the near field zone of large antennas, such as reflector dish antennas. Our goal was to quantify the absolute magnitudes of the electric field distributions in their respective V/m values. Our approach relies on the spectral theory of radiation, which has ofte...