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Low-Cost Educational System for Electromagnetics & Wireless Communications

The 2013 IEEE AP-S Antenna Design Challenge required student teams to build an antenna system with reconfigurable antenna elements that can adapt to different propagation conditions. Other challenge specifications stated that the antenna system should be used to teach how antennas work, and that the system should operate at 2.4 GHz with its own source. This reconfigurable antenna measurement system for educational use, from the Huff Research Group at Texas A&M University, tied for first place in the challenge. Two-crossed dipole antennas connected to XBee radios and Teensy microcontrollers serve as the basis of the measurement system. The crossed-dipole antennas were simulated and then fabricated, and the radiation patterns of the antennas were then measured using the measurement system and compared to the simulated results.