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A team of Montana State University researchers made up of faculty and students worked with Advanced Acoustic Concepts to develop a new antenna design that may improve mobile phone communication in rugged and rural areas.

The project began about six years ago when MSU researchers wanted to design and demonstrate an antenna that could form a beam in a particular direction, find another user it wants to communicate with and track that user as it moves around.

One of the research team's original motivations was to meet some communication requirements that the navy has, and now they have a significant amount of interest in dealing with rural communication problems.

"We got a national science foundation grant to examine some problems of communicators," said MSU professor Richard Wolff. "Wireless communications in rural and remote areas so we thought an antenna of this nature could be useful in that regard as well, so we had a combination of requirements that drove us toward this antenna design."

The MSU technology transfer office is working with companies to examine how the antenna would work in some of their system requirements.