3d fractal antenna (discone)

[coppercone2]

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8012467

Has anyone looked at fractal 3d antennas before? I guess planar fractal antennas are not as interesting as this.

It seems that that antenna reminds me of a fractal discone. I am thinking a fractal biconical antenna would do something as well. This would be a fascinating use of 3d printing and metal casting IMO.

It does look difficult to cast however, the metal used would need to have a very high flow and it would need to be die cast (hard) or maybe vacuum poured.

But I don't think there is anything preventing anyone from cutting a whole bunch of pyramids out by hand and soldering/brazing them together in a fixture.. it would just require the use of heat sink putty to prevent the previous bonds from desoldering themselves. Might get quite tricky to solder that by hand.

[richnormand]

Looked at fractal antennas about 10 years ago. Although they looked intriguing and nice in many cases, we went with the concept of metamaterials.
The metamaterial approach allows you to better control the apparent dielectric constant of the support material, yields a very compact geometry and
polarisation and permittivity matching.

Several modems and cell phones integrated that technology and there was interest from several antenna manufacturers.
I don't really know what is the state-of-the-art at this time.

This might give you a start should you be interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial_antenna#:~:text=Metamaterial%20antennas%20are%20a%20class,(electrically%20small)%20antenna%20systems.&text=Some%20applications%20for%20metamaterial%20antennas,space%20vehicle%20navigation%20and%20airplanes.

Also there was lots of metamaterial interest in microwave and optics for cloaking applications at the time.