Antenna design and manufacture has historically been pretty, well, primitive. There are reasons for this: early on, solving the large systems of equations to adequately model complex antennas was difficult. Luckily, advances in computers and software make that much more tractable. Now, we can design antennas with dozens or even hundreds of elements, and in complex three dimensional shapes. But manufacturing such antennas has been difficult. Hence, my interest in this article:

3-D printing method advances electrically small antenna design.

According to Bernhard, these antennas are electrically small relative to a wavelength (typically a twelfth of a wavelength or less) and exhibit performance metrics that are an order of magnitude better than those realized by monopole antenna designs.

Haven’t had time to rundown the original article yet, but it seems really intriguing. More later.

Addendum: Here’s a link to the article in PDF format, thankfully not behind a pay wall. I’ll find time to read it at lunch time.