To become a professional antenna designer, you can follow one of two paths: you can enroll in college- and graduate-level courses on electromagnetism, immerse yourself in the empirical study of antenna shapes, and apprentice yourself to an established technician willing to impart the closely guarded secrets of the discipline. Or you can do what Jason Lohn did: let evolution do the work. Physicists know a lot about Maxwell's equations and the other principles governing wireless communications. But antenna design is still pretty much a dark art, says Lohn, a computer scientist working at NASA Ames Research Center outside Mountain View, CA. "The field is so squirrelly. All your learning is through trial and error, the school of hard knocks."
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