This special issue of the International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technologies hosts an extended version of selected papers presented at the 15th edition of the European Conference on Antennas and Propagation (EuCAP), which was virtually held from March 22 to 26, 2021.
Despite the fact that this edition was planned to be in Dusseldorf, Germany, and the tremendous efforts of the general chair, Prof. Thomas Kürner, the EuCAP Conference Organizing Committee, and the EurAAP Board, this EuCAP edition was virtual due to the lockdown imposed worldwide by the outbreak of the Corona pandemic. The conference included 711 accepted papers, selected through a rigorous peer-review process from the 818 submitted papers.
EuCAP is organized by the European Association on Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP), created in 2006 to give a common voice to the European antenna and propagation scientific community. The Association brings together enterprises, academia, local societies, scientists, and engineers in Europe, is active in education and dissemination, through the European School of Antennas (ESoA), and promotes the collaboration with other international societies and institutes in the field of antennas and propagation (for more information please visit www.euraap.org).
The cooperation between EurAAP and the European Microwave Association (EuMA) dates back to the early days of EurAAP establishment. A Memorandum of Understanding is in place and a Joint Committee has been created in 2019 to further increase the interactions and foster collaborative actions between EuMA and EurAAP.
In the frame of this cooperation, EurAAP has been invited, this year for the fifth time, to compose a guest issue of the International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technology with a selection of highly ranked contributions presented at the 2021 edition of EuCAP, covering topics that are interesting for a broader microwave community. The authors were invited to submit to the journal an extended version of the conference paper, which underwent a regular review process.
Although EuCAP mainly covers advances in antenna technologies and propagation, we share with EuMA and the IJMWT readers the same passion and fascination for microwaves. We hope with this special issue to inspire the reader with new ideas and foster scientific collaborations. Eight papers have been selected for this issue, covering all the EuCAP areas: antenna theory and design, RF measurements, propagation, and electromagnetics. These papers also belong to different application tracks of our conference.
We would like to thank the authors, the reviewers, the editorial team of the journal, and particularly the Editor in Chief of IJMWT for their kind invitation and support.
Oscar Quevedo-Teruel received his telecommunication engineering and Ph.D. degrees from Carlos III University of Madrid, Spain in 2005 and 2010. From 2010 to 2011, he joined the Department of Theoretical Physics of Condensed Matter at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid as a research fellow and went on to continue his postdoctoral research at Queen Mary University of London from 2011 to 2013. In 2014, he joined the Division for Electromagnetic Engineering in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden where he is a full professor, and responsible for the Antenna Laboratory and director of the Master Program in Electromagnetics Fusion and Space Engineering. He has been an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation since 2018–2022 and track editor since 2022. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the EurAAP journal Reviews of Electromagnetics since 2020. He was the EurAAP delegate for Sweden, Norway, and Iceland from 2018 to 2020, and he has been a member of the EurAAP Board of Directors since January 2021. Since January 2022, he is the vice-chair of EurAAP. He was a distinguished lecturer of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society for the period of 2019–2022, and he is the chair of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society's Educational Initiatives Program since 2020. He has made scientific contributions to higher symmetries, transformation optics, lens antennas, metasurfaces, leaky wave antennas, and high impedance surfaces. He is the co-author of 120 papers in international journals and 200 at international conferences.
Manuel Sierra Castañer was born in 1970 in Zaragoza (Spain). He obtained the degree of telecommunication engineering in 1994 and the Ph.D. in 2000, both from the Technical University of Madrid (UPM) in Spain. He worked for the cellular company Airtel from 1995 to 1997. Since 1997, he worked in the University “Alfonso X” as an assistant, and since 1998 at the Technical University of Madrid where he is a full professor since 2017. He has been a visitor researcher in Tokyo Tech (September–December 1998) and EPFL (September–December 1999) during his Ph.D. and a visitor professor in Tokyo Tech during the summers of 2012 and 2013. Currently, he is a senior member of the IEEE and Fellow of AMTA Society. His current research interests are in planar antennas and antenna measurement systems. Dr. Sierra-Castañer obtained the IEEE APS 2007 Schelkunoff Prize Paper Award for the paper “Dual-Polarization Dual-Coverage Reflectarray for Space Applications” in 2007 and other awards for papers in conferences. He has been the AMTA Europe Liaison since 2015 until the end of 2019. Since January 2016 until end of 2018, he has been member of the EurAAP board of directors, and since January 2019 until end of 2021, vice-chair. Currently, he is dean of the Telecommunication School of Technical University of Madrid. He has been the chair of EuCAP 2022 edition in Madrid.
Stefania Monni (IEEE SM) was born in Cagliari, Italy, in 1974. She obtained her M.Sc. in electronic engineering in 1999 from the University of Cagliari, Italy, and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2005 from the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Between 1999 and 2000 she was with the European Space Agency ESA-ESTEC, The Netherlands, as young graduate trainee on interferometry and polarimetry techniques for synthetic aperture radar. Currently, she is a senior scientist at the Radar Technology Department of TNO, The Netherlands, and she leads the Antenna Team, where she is responsible for the technical coordination of the research activities and the long-term strategy. Next to this, since 2019 she is also with the Chip Integration Technology Centre, in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, as a senior scientist of the Program on Antennas in Package. Her research interests include active array antennas and periodic structures, filters, and advanced manufacturing technologies. Dr. S. Monni is currently chair of the Board of Directors of the European Association of Antennas and Propagation (EurAAP). She is one of the initiators of the Joint Committee between EurAAP and the European Microwave Association (EuMA). She has over 70 publications, including journals, peer-reviewed conferences, book chapters, and patents. She was co-recipient of the Best Innovation Award from the European Space Agency in 2018.
