Radio Ham interviewed about Fractal antenna

Nathan Cohen W1YW was interviewed about his Fractal Antenna for a TV show, Hunting the Hidden Dimension, now available to watch online.

In the show he says:

I was at an astronomy conference in Hungary, and Dr. Mandelbrot was giving a talk about the large-scale structure of the universe, and reporting how using fractals is a very good way of understanding that kind of structure, which really wowed the entire group of astronomers.

He showed several different fractals that I, in my own mind, looked at and said, "Oh, wouldn't it be funny if you made an antenna out of that shape. I wonder what it would do."

I thought back to the lecture and said, "Well, I've got a piece of wire, what happens if I bend it?" After I bent the wire, I hooked it up to the cable and my ham radio, and I was quite surprised to see that it worked the first time out of the box. It worked very well. And I discovered that—much of a surprise to me—that I could actually make the antenna much smaller, using the fractal design. So it was, frankly, an interesting way to beat a bad rap with the landlord.

Using fractals, experimentally, I came up with a very-wide-band antenna, and then I worked backwards and said, "Why is it working this way? What is it about nature that requires you to use the fractal to get there?"

The result of that work was a mathematical theorem that showed if you want to get something that works as an antenna over a very wide range of frequencies, you need to have self-similarity. It has to be fractal in its shape to make it work. And that was an exact solution. It wasn't like, "Oh, here's a way of doing it and there's a lot of other ways of doing it." It turned out, mathematically, we were able to demonstrate that was the only technique we could use to get there.

The 53-minute show was aired by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and can be seen on the web at
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/
hunting-hidden-dimension.html

PBS have blocked the show for certain countries such as the UK but using a US-based Proxy Server will get around it.

Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc.
http://www.fractenna.com/

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