Modern communications depend critically on both the performance and the packaging of antennas; thanks to ever more diversified usage requirements, there has been much progress in the area. This is what this 1,680-page handbook tries to cover, addressing a wide range of specialized topics. It is organized in six parts and 33 chapters, written by 68 authors from different countries.

The six parts address: fundamental parameters and definitions of antennas; antenna elements; arrays and their synthesis; advanced materials and structures; some applications; and methods of analysis, modeling, and simulation. It is important to mention that each chapter is a rather long tutorial that generally has a design-oriented structure, a few key equations, and illustrative drawings, photographs, and data tables. Also, most chapters survey and compare alternative approaches in each specific area, with main results instead of extensive derivations.

Chapter 1, of Part 1, “Fundamental Parameters and Definitions for Antennas,” gives a pedagogical, well-structured introduction to most key parameters and formulas, with a useful summary table.

Part 2, about 400 pages, is titled “Antenna Elements,” and covers dipoles, monopoles, loops, waveguides, horns, micro strips, reflector antennas, spirals, log periodics, leaky wave antennas, reconfigurable antennas, wideband and traveling wave, and small and fractal antennas. All information is truly useful, but a beginner would benefit from an additional overview of what types of elements are typically used for what applications, including frequency and performance range.

Part 3, “Arrays and Synthesis Methods,” is about 130 pages, and focuses on arrays and smart antennas, wideband arrays, and their synthesis; it does not address computational complexity or beam forming/focusing algorithms in relation to signal processing.

Part 4 has about 350 pages, and covers various important and up-to-date material about antennas and issues about techniques, such as negative-index metamaterials, artificial impedance surfaces, frequency selective screens, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), feed antennas, near-field scanning measurements, general antenna measurements, and scattering. Both beginners and experts will benefit from the practical coverage, in chapter 20, of the basic instrumentation, and benchmarking performance thereof, for selection purposes.

Part 5 descriptively surveys, in 350 pages, selected antenna applications to wireless laptops, base stations, mobile terminals, phased arrays, ground planes, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, medical therapeutics and imaging, and in-vitro experiments. While all of the material is interesting, there are some small overlaps between chapters, and sometimes data is missing from industrial systems and power/range requirements.

Part 6, 200 pages, is about numerical techniques in general, and antenna modeling by integral equations, finite differences, genetic models, and neural networks, in particular. The sources of the software are sometimes mentioned when public software exists. There is an excellent 21-page index.

This handbook is both an achievement and a real tool. Even though a few specific items are missing, the book achieves a rare balance between usage and reference values. I highly recommend it to both practitioners and researchers.