Introduction To Plasma Antenna

The future of high-frequency, high-speed wireless communications could very well be plasma antennas capable of transmitting focused radio waves that would quickly dissipate using conventional antennas.

  Transmission and reception of electromagnetic waves have become an integral part of the present day civilisation. Antenna is an essential device for this process. It is a transducer that transmits or receives electromagnetic waves. In other words, antennas convert electromagnetic radiation into electric current, or vice versa. Antennas are used in systems such as radio and television broadcasting, point-to-point radio communication, wireless LAN, cellphones, radar, and spacecraft communication. Antennas are most commonly employed in air or outer space, but can also be operated underwater or even through soil and rock at certain frequencies for short distances. Growing need for speed of communication network along with data handling capacity are the major forces helping to explore new vistas of trans- mission and reception. With the wire- less generations moving from 2G to 3G, 4G, 5G and so on, the real benefit of upgrading the Wi-Fi networks is to get them to run faster. Wi-Fi usually can manage 54 megabits of data per second. The fancied Wi-Fig (a graphical user interface for configuring wire- less connection) would handle up to 7 gigabits per second. This would mean downloading a TV show in a matter of seconds. Advances in antenna technology are expected to play a great role in the desired speed and capacity- handling capabilities of communication networks.