MEL developed and manufactured medical equipment and military wireless and electronics. In the late 1980s he transferred to the Philips factory nearby: MEL in Crawley (where he lived). He was awarded a fellowship of the IERE in the mid-1980s for his lifetime’s microwave work. As part of this he started working on a variety of microwave antennas, which led to his invention of the Vivaldi antenna in ~1978.īy the early 1980s Peter was spending all his time on microwave antennas, and published papers on microstrip arrays. (The first picture above shows Peter inspecting a microwave diode amplifier in the 1960s Click on it to see it at higher resolution). Much of this time was spent working on microwave devices. For the first 30 years or so he remained at the Laboratories, which were renamed Philips Research Laboratories Redhill in 1977. Peter was to spend almost all of the rest of his career in Philips. Mullard Research Laboratories was built by and always owned by the Dutch electronics giant: Philips. This enabled him to apply to become chartered with the IERE (Institution of Electronics and Radio Engineers – since merged with other institutions to become today's IET). For the next five years he studied part-time at Croydon College for his ONC (Ordinary National Certificate) and HNC (Higher National Certificate). After his apprenticeship, aged 21, Peter joined Mullard Research Laboratories, Redhill. Born December 1934 in Gillingham Kent he attended Chatham Technical School at 11 and at age 16 he went to Chatham Dockyard to start a five year Apprenticeship in Electrical Engineering. Peter Gibson was a chartered engineer, specialising in microwave devices and antennas, yet he never went to university. Thanks to Peter's wife Pat, and friend and co-worker Peter, we now have three images of Peter Gibson to share with the microwave world, and an interesting biographical sketch of him.īelow is the story of Peter Gibson as told by friend and family, which will also provide a flavor of what it is like to be an electrical engineer in the UK, in the past and present, and what it means to be "qualified". (And yes, I think he did try to name another antenna after a "musician" who had invented a similar instrument, but that other antenna never caught on - I don't recall him publishing a paper about it.) Anyway, that was Peter's own explanation of why he gave the name. Vivaldi had written a trumpet concerto, and it was the 300th anniversary of Vivaldi’s birth in 1678. He told me that he called the tapered slot antenna a "Vivaldi" as it looked like the cross-section of an early trumpet. Peter was really into music, composing pieces, teaching piano in those days and was a church organist. After that I kept in contact with him through to his retirement and eventually his death. I knew Peter as I worked with him at Philips Research Laboratories UK from 1983 through to when he left in the late 1980s. But we received a better explanation of his choice of name for the tapered slot antenna, from another Peter who worked with him:
Vivaldi antenna update#
Update February 2012: We are sad to report that Peter Gibson died in 2010. If you ask an antenna engineer where the name came from, chances are he'll tell you Vivaldi was the inventor. Gibson never said why he named his innovative antenna the "Vivaldi" aerial in the paper. New for March 2012: Peter Gibson now appears in our Microwave Hall of Fame! New for October 2013: we describe egg crate construction. In the abstract he describes it as "a new member of the class of aperiodic continuously scaled antenna structures, as such, it has theoretically unlimited instantaneous bandwidth."
Gibson in a paper entitled The Vivaldi Aerial. The Vivaldi antenna was first discussed in a 1979 IEEE European Microwave Conference paper by P. Peter Gibson invented the Vivaldi antenna in 1978, in the UK. The Vivaldi antenna, sometimes referred to as or the Vivaldi notch antenna, and also known as the tapered slot antenna (TSA), is easy to fabricate on a circuit board, and can provide ultra-wide wide bandwidth. Click here to go to our main page on antennas
0 kommentar(er)
