In my younger days—about the time that Erik the Red was making a name for himself—I was really into electronics. Countless never-quite-working-as-expected circuits should have taught me the futility of telling electrons what to do. Yet my interest in electronics peaked with the construction of an electronically steerable phased-array antenna. This is where, by varying the timing slightly, numerous small antennas create a signal that can be sent in specific directions without moving any hardware.
Yes, my set-up did actually work, though not as well as I’d hoped. Anyway, what excited me about phased-array antennas is that you could shape and steer an antenna’s radiation pattern by individually controlling the phase and amplitude of a string of individual emitters. It just seemed so cool.
