Be the first on your block with a Particle Swarm Optimized antenna

[Sam KS2AM]

http://www.innovantennas.com/

[KA0HCP]

I hope the exchange rate from the Pound to Dollar will bring down the cost of all those fancy words they use.  

p.s.  Should I keep my old beekeepers suit, in case it swarms in the spring?

[Opcom]

I'm not satisfied with what was presented. Nowhere was easily found anything about exact specifications or dimensions especially on the 40-12M unit. I found terms and conditions and a contact form instead. They could work on the site a bit and correct those confusions.

[K5WLF]

The ad copy sorta reminded me of the old "Engineering Buzz Phrase Generator", wherein you pick one word from each column and drop the resulting phrase in your report. "Particle Swarm Optimization", I must admit, was one I'd never thought of.

I looked over the site and was disappointed at the lack of explanation for all the fancy phraseology they had there. It'd seem if you're going to produce an antenna based on newly discovered engineering principles, you'd figure that your intended audience would like an explanation of why those principles make your antenna better. Their ad copy failed on all counts with me. I didn't even bother to find out what the antennae cost.

If I combine the money I saved by not buying an optimized particle swarm and by not buying a dipole where they couldn't even find the center of the damn thing, I can buy a 1000' roll of good ol' copper wire and make some dipoles that actually work. Any leftover money can either go to the equipment fund, or toward some tasty beverages for the "hanging party".

Did I miss something, or is this trend in advertising just ham radio's version of snake oil?

ldb
K5WLF

[Ed/KB1HYS]

marketing is what it is.  There has never been a "truth in advertising" requirement.  I bet we could find Gimmick adds as far back as you'd care to go. 

Caveat Emptor

[k4kyv]

We have seen snake oil marketing in CB radio for decades, and in more recent times it appears to have been highly successful in audiophoolery; now it is creeping more and more into the amateur radio appliance market.

This was inevitable as amateur radio has evolved so far away from being the technical pursuit it once was, and has become more like a "communicator's hobby", just another facet of consumer electronics, where people get "into HAM" and merely spend money to purchase a product with little interest in what's inside the box or understanding of how it works.

[nq5t]

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is a computational method.  It has nothing to do with the antenna somehow being a particle swarm snake oil thing, "swarming" up the aether.

Whether PSO modeling in this situation actually produces better designs than other optimization techniques is a valid question, and probably worth looking at, but there really isn't any snake oil here, other than pitching PSO as something unique.  It's been around for a long time.

[KA0HCP]

How about their claim for sky temperature figures?

[Steve - K4HX]

Sky temperature is a function of how much naturally occuring noise is received by an antenna (from the sky, there is also ground temperture). It follows that the more directional an antenna, the lower its sky temperature. But I've never heard this term used below about 400 MHz, because the sky temperture is the same, no matter where you point the antenna.

Whether the claims made by InnovAntennas are true is another story.

[Tom WA3KLR]

Maybe it's supposed to be "Particle Optimized Swarm" antenna, POS.

[k4kyv]

Maybe it's supposed to be "Particle Optimized Swarm" antenna, POS.

Better still, try one of these.

For further study, click here.