3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Rather brief.. but excellent nontheless, December 13, 2000
This review is from: Design of Nonplanar Microstrip Antennas and Transmission Lines (Hardcover)
I have the utmost respect for Professor Wong, he has written a good account of a fascinating and deep subject.
However, I have some minor points about the book to raise.
Firstly, the references quoted are not quite as extensive as they might be. The majority of references are taken from the Journal of Optical and Microwave Engineering, a Wiley journal which may be quite difficult to find - many of the aquisitions departments of Universities in the UK do not have complete volumes, or in many cases, any copies at all. Many good references can be obtained from the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Transactions, which are more accessible but it does, again help to have access to a good library!
Secondly, I am a little concerned about the absence of a glossary. This is a problem when there are incomplete extracts from existing papers. It can be confusing when talking about k (subscript xxx) when it is not very clear that the assumptions behind the paper presuppose a radially anisotropic dielectric layer and these are the diagonal components of the permittivity tensor! The other side to this is that when quotations from papers are as incomplete as this, the book CANNOT (and this was very sad) be used as a one stop guide to constructing numeric methods for solving the many beautiful examples in the text - you need to look to the original papers. And this occurs, sadly, many times throughout the text.
Thirdly, and this is less of a problem, there is no discussion of the stability of the resulting sets of coupled integral equations. I know that the Galerkin method has excellent prognosis for solutions in nearly all cases, but in some equations there are mild singularities in the kernels, and I really was hoping that there would be some discussion about the numerical convergence issues.
Thirdly, and this is ever so slightly more disappointing, there are no references to pattern synthesis algorithms suitable for curved surfaces. I would expect there to be a chapter on canonical synthesis methods, that is pattern synthesis using dipole or simple multipole sources positioned on curvilinear surfaces, using conventional transform theory and techniques such as the Remez exchange algorithm. This is completely missing! There is, however, a good amount of detail on element to element coupling, so this is valuable detail for engineers with access to these methods.
I would also like to see much more information on the kind of mechanical techniques used to construct these devices. This of course has a bearing on the actual values likely to occur in dielectric non-ideality and give the reader some preparation for attention to this well before other commitments are made. There are some excellent papers written on anisotropic dielectrics - Manuel Horno is one author worth looking up.
Another somewhat mising area is the subject of near field to far field transformations, which in the case of curvilinear surfaces, very interesting indeed.
I have a feeling that the missing material was possibly the result of a constraint placed on the length of the manuscript by the publisher. The author clearly is very proficient with this very difficult subject and has done a terrific job of uniting many sources into one reference book. The text is very well written and very engaging.
On the whole, I am very pleased with the book, it is fascinating and I know I will be very absorbed in it for some considerable time. Thank you, and best wishes, Prof. Kin-Lu Wong.
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