Introduction to the Virtual Antenna Laboratory (VALab)

For a high quality education in antenna design the availability of numerical tools is extremely helpful, since it provides an increased understanding of the physics behind an antenna problem and also reduces the need for expensive and bulky antenna measurement equipment.

Therefore, ideally a comprehensive antenna education, which includes different tools that today are being developed with little coordination among different institutions and research centers, should be of great value. Since the software is proprietary to the universities or companies that have developed them, sharing it directly is a problem.

The key feature of the VALab working package is to develop something more than a regular website where the student or/and the researcher can download only static pages, despite the fact that they can move from one to the other using hyperlinks. Moreover, the idea is to provide them the possibility of integrating some executable modules, already available among the ACE network, into their own codes. In the virtual laboratory all the material that the partners have decided to share with the other participants should be available for the researchers, according to the restrictions that the owners have indicated. Moreover, the virtual laboratory would also include educational material and examples of different antennas design.

The Virtual Antenna Laboratory (VALab) will provide the following services:

• Educational materials, where the users will find notes, slides and anything else they might need to improve their knowledge in a specific antenna field;
• A set of step-by-step design tools which allows users to practice the design of different antennas;
• A set of canonical solutions that can be used to compare results from self-developed algorithms;
• A set of executable modules (server-side) that the users can use as a base for easily building and testing their own numerical codes (the modules remain proprietary to the single entities; they can be only used but not downloaded by the user).