Harold A. Wheeler's Antenna Design Legacy

Harold A. Wheeler had a distinguished career in the field of radio-electronics. He had a unique talent for reducing complex scientific principles to simple forms that were universally helpful to theoreticians and practitioners. Of his many contributions, those related to antenna design are the subject of this paper. The three principal antenna topics in Dr. Wheeler's experience were impedance matching to a transmission line, electrically small antennas, and planar arrays. This paper concentrates on the first two topics and presents two examples of how he developed simple forms that were very helpful and useful to the antenna community. His solutions, although simple in form, were in exact agreement with those based on more rigorous theory.