About - Antennas Research Ltd
Antennas Research
Antennas Research Ltd. 2020
WebRadio
About the company's founder, John Thornton MSc. PhD. MIEEE.
In brief...
Originally a physics graduate, I returned to science after a protracted spell in aerospace industry, and commenced an MSc. in Microwave Solid State Physics at the University of Portsmouth in 1994. This lead to a project with the Millimetre Wave Technology Group at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, where I hung about for nearly two years. During this period I also worked as a consultant for the European Space Agency, developing frequency multipliers as millimetre wave sources in the region 270 GHz. I then held a research post with the communications group at the University of Oxford's Department of Engineering Science, initially to work on radar research. I completed a doctoral thesis on passive microwave transponders with the Open University in 2002. From 2000 to 2010 I held the post of Research Fellow at the University of York. In 2010 I stepped back into the commercial world and joined Canada's MDA Corporation. At their small UK subsidiary I carried out antenna product development for satellite communications , until this drew to a close in 2017.
Archives describing projects and research publications from two of these periods (University of Oxford, University of York) may be found on this site.
In more recent years I've carried out studies and design exercises for other businesses and agencies. I used the brand 'Antennas Research' to publish conference articles and the like on a few occasions, and based an earlier website upon this heading.
In 2017 I incorporated Antennas Research Ltd.
The photograph above shows a power divider for a phased array radar. This sits on the reverse side of the phase control layer pictured on the home page. You may notice that the design is slightly unusual, having 40 output ports in a corporate network. Designs using cascaded 2-way dividers (8,16,32 outputs and so on) are more usually encountered and also easier to design. This component also sets the aperture taper across the radar antenna, controlling sidelobes as far as is practicable using PCB technology.