Dealing with an antenna is one of those topics we never feel like we know enough about. MIT had a live stream of [Dr. Kiersten Kerby-Patel] discussing antennas in a talk, sponsored by the ham radio club on campus. You can see the recording below.

The main assertion of the presentation is that everything is a dipole unless it is a loop. Although the professor probably deals with antennas at an extremely high theoretical level, she did a great job of keeping it aimed at ham radio operators.

The talk is about an hour long, so it isn’t optimized for the YouTube generation. There’s some introductory material that looks as though it would have been in one of our old physics classes. However, the talk gets more practical towards the end.

There’s the obligatory mention of Yagis and loops. There’s even a Smith chart. If you don’t know what the Chu limit is, you should definitely be watching this video. The end of the talk covers some very small antennas using active devices or even moving parts.

If you want more discussions on the why behind antennas, we really liked this video. This two-parter is worth your time, too.