This project provides the national educational community with an Antenna Toolbox that is used with the MATLAB package to illustrate complex phenomena related to the design of antennas, and with the physical features, the propagation characteristics of electromagnetic fields, and the important aspects of the physical layer for a wireless communication system. The educational material being developed is unique in that it provides full-wave electromagnetic solutions using a computing platform, MATLAB, which is the only universal computational language understood by the majority of electrical engineering students worldwide. Other computational educational materials provide software written in Fortran, and hence are not readily accessible to undergraduate students. Other available MATLAB-based software for antenna analysis and design utilize approximations and hence, they do not include all the physics associated with a particular design. This MATLAB ANTENNA TOOLBOX represents a unique and valuable contribution to the educational cornucopia that is available to faculty who teach at the undergraduate student level. Furthermore, this toolbox is to be used in a complementary fashion with other analysis tool and codes that the students are familiar with. Therefore, by casting the difficult subject of antenna design and analysis in a familiar form (e.g. a MATLAB Toolbox) and to utilize the full capabilities of MATLAB to integrate graphical user interface, efficient computation, and graphical output, it is expected that the faculty will better respond to the different learning styles of all students taking antenna design and analysis courses. Hence, student retention in these courses should be better.
