Fabrication and measurement of homemade standard antennas

Apprenticeship is linked to training. This paper is intended to be a tutorial on how to design, fabricate, and measure antennas in an economical and easy way, using recycled materials and common electronic devices such as a laptop and an access point. Several antenna designs built with household materials are proposed, giving practical design and fabrication guidelines. The use of the Wi-Fi band allows linking the experiment with daily-life devices, and proposing a simple and economical antenna-measurement system. The capacity to experiment with antennas from their design to measurement will defi nitely stimulate undergraduate or graduate students to get acquainted with the basic topics of antennas and propagation. The paper presented herein was awarded with the fi rst price in the IEEE AP-S Student Challenge 2010 [1, 2].