A low-cost hybrid textile/PCB wearable rectenna is designed for smart on-body applications. It is an integration of a textile patch antenna and a highly efficient rectifier on a small PCB substrate, where the feeding aperture of the antenna is significantly miniaturized by exploiting an LC loading technique in order to have an effective integration with the rectifier. The feeding-rectifying circuitry is attached to the back of the antenna by normal sewing threads. The essential components are soldered on the small rigid PCB for a robust connection. The size of the rectenna is 0.817 × 0.817 λ ₀ ² while the rigid substrate area for the feeding-rectifying circuitry is only 0.278 × 0.147 λ ₀ ² (3.4 cm × 1.8 cm) at 2.45 GHz. The intrinsic dielectric/conduction loss of textile feedlines, the loss of antenna-to-rectifier interconnectors, the loss of soldering or gluing on textiles, and the loss due to body absorption from typical large feeding slots are constitutively reduced. The soldering points and the consequent hard-to-be-characterized parasitic effects on textiles are avoided. The proposed integration approach reduces the cost and eases the rectenna design, fabrication, and integration. As a result, the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of the rectifier reaches up to 39.5% at -20 dBm input power level whilst the experimental rectenna prototype achieves the state-of-the-art PCE of 41% at an extremely low incident power density of 0.4 μW/cm ² . The maximum PCE is 56% at the -5 dBm input power. Finally, the possibility of harvesting datalink energy from PC/mobile phones as power source for wearable electronics is investigated.

This article introduces the FORMAT array, a reconfigurable millimeter-wave antenna array platform based on antenna tiles. FORMAT stands for Flexible Organization and Reconfiguration of Millimeter-wave Antenna Tiles, which is a unique hardware solution aiming to implement and demonstrate a variety of antenna array concepts, as well as different array architectures and configurations from the same basic module, providing even benchmark between different solutions and thus valuable insights into fifth-generation (5G) and beyond-5G antenna systems. The combination of a minimum-sized $2\times 2$ tile with 3D-printed frame parts enables antenna arrays of a variety of sizes, allows multiple beamforming architectures, and a range of different antenna element positioning in the array. The hardware implementation is thoroughly described, with a few different array assemblies being manufactured and measured, validating their antenna performance with over-the-air measurements. Finally, using FORMAT hardware as both base station and user equipment, a 5-m wireless communication link was set up, achieving 4.8 Gbps downlink speed with QAM64 modulation.

In response to the concern about growing electromagnetic radiation levels, special clothes, bedcovers, and curtains made from shielding textiles are already available. In some cases claimed shielding properties are incredibly high. The goal of this paper is to introduce a simple measurement method dedicated to textiles. A free space two‐horn set‐up in combination with a post‐processing technique is used to determine shielding effectiveness. At higher frequencies, a simple wireless link with two horn antennas can be used. This type of measurement tends to show high oscillations, especially when the samples are in the order of a wavelength or smaller. This is due to multiple reflections and diffractions. These oscillations can be smoothened using fitting techniques or a post‐processing procedure based on a simulated Gaussian pulse in time domain. The proposed procedures are tested for different textile topologies in the frequency range 1–5 GHz.