Antennas!  I have spent the last few days learning to use our milling machine, practicing on cheap substrate, fixing the alignment here and there…but I think I have the hang of it now.  I built my first antenna today, which I was pretty happy about.  One problem I ran into was the ceramic substrate I used isn’t very easily cut, but I figured out a way to cutout substrate pieces using a router bit for the mill.

Now I need to find a big ground plane so I can measure it and see how it compares to my HFSS simulations.  Currently it is a 31X31X3mm susbtrate with a single patch on it that resonates at 1.5GHz, to provide a benchmark for my simulations.  I plan on building a number of these to get some experimental verification of some trends, and potentially piece together one of the stacked patch configurations that comes within 4mm of meeting my original design goals.  Assuming this goes well, I will be defending my thesis come early April…