Hackaday Supercon - HunterScott : Why Phased Arrays are Cool and How to Build One

Hunter Scott's talk from the 2018 Hackaday Superconference explains what phased arrays are, their basic architecture, their benefits, and how to make one yourself. He also talks about how we can take advantage of new chips for the coming 5G standard to reduce hardware cost and complexity.

Read the article on Hackaday:

Slides Hunter's talk are available on his website:

[ChristianRodriguez-xbfy]

this was enjoyable to watch. And yeah, RF is mostly figuring out why things don't work :)

[midnightman]

These talks and presentations are nice Hackaday .. thanks for your hard work

[sergarlantyrell]

I have been thinking about this for YEARS and I'm glad to hear I wasn't THAT far off in my napkin designs considering RF design is completely new to me.

It's definitely going on the "How hard can it be?" list of DIY projects I plan to do within the next several years.

[AndrewJones-tjet]

That's an awesome presentation on this topic by Hunter. I can appreciate some of the rabbit holes he has probably gone down with this stuff.

[outrospectionall]

Great presentation straight to the point - love the style

[jafinch]

This looks really awesome. I just realized when I've been using the term passive phased array... I've been wrong. For my system I was only planning on receive mode only to maintain more radio silence. Then interpreting and interpolating the data based on phased received on each antenna as well as other characteristic. This has been a great presentation and I appreciate the detail! Really cool how the microwave systems are like RF erector sets almost. I think there is an area of opportunity to bring this down to the not as budget liquid hackers. Reminds me of machine tools for watches more now with modern microscopes and CNC's, even if using rotary controllers, to aid in construction details. Maybe have extra material on the initial PCB runs to trim later for tuning? Looking forward to seeing this project move forward.

[SurajGrewal]

While f16 have panning radar, I think, f15 does have phased array radar.

[jhnrn]

What's the chip you mention at the end?

[shirishjadav]

Thats a brillient stuff. Well I am looking for resource where I want to find AoA of BLE beacons. I Know Nordic has done it but I want to do without RF just multiple NRF51, NRF52 chips detecting same mac address and get to know the delta between both receiving same mac. I want to know from people if even if its possible to do so ?

[charlesmartin]

If you're just phase shifting the carrier wave, wouldn't a data signal get distorted for directions far from the normal vector? I think to get a crisp steerable-directional 5g signal onto a dongle, you'd have to find a way to condense a bunch of RF delay elements onto a printed circuit. I think it can be done, but yikes

Ambitious project. A+. Cheering for you from the sidelines

[timonsku]

All these Supercon videos are unfortunately badly leveled, they are all super silent always have to turn up the volume to 100% :(

[transkryption]

3:20 Smoked wheee!....watching those animations and wooow.., He's explaining what I'd always wondered,
this is no art o' multiple coathangers/cantennas strung togwther. I get it man! ... If I'd dropped acid or smoked weed and watched this at 14, I would have a PhD in physics and be a billionaire.

[straat]

So could I make a 38 Ghz antenna with 6 6.4ghz antennas?

[edgeeffect]

Mentioning that "phased arrays" are a kind of antenna and that this is RF stuff in the title or description would have saved me (okay, only) 2

[DBuilder]

I would like to comment on this video but we don't have time for this

[shartne]

Hey be careful you dont fry your brain or someone else's brain.