Jim Breakall

Biography:

Prof. Emeritus James K. Breakall, Life Fellow IEEE, Fellow RCA

Dr. Breakall holds a doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Applied Physics from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, and has over 50 years of experience in numerical electromagnetics and antennas.

Dr. Breakall is a full professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Penn State and a Senior Engineer for Sabre Systems, LLC part-time. In addition to his past senior and graduate antenna courses teaching assignments and thesis advisor for numerous Doctoral and Master’s candidates, he still performs research studies and projects for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines in the antenna field.  A representative sampling of these include: Former professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, Project Engineer on team that developed the Numerical Electromagnetic Code (NEC) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Project on modeling the antenna wires which trail at up to five miles from a Boeing E 6A jet aircraft on Navy TACAMO program, Designed antenna for the world's most powerful (6 gigawatts ERP) and sophisticated HF ionospheric modification facility HAARP for the Air Force and Navy, Led the HF Polar Equatorial Near-Vertical Incidence Experiment (PENEX) for Navy, Worked on new antenna design UESA for the E2C for Navy (NAWC-AD – PAX River), Led project for the design of a new HF Cassegrain feed (300 megawatts ERP) at the Arecibo Observatory, PR, 1000 foot dish antenna, Designed both vertical and horizontal bicone rapid deployable antennas that have instantaneous bandwidth for the whole HF band (3 to 30 MHz) for the Air Force Research Lab at Rome NY. 

Dr. Breakall is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Antennas and Propagation Society, IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, is a Fellow of RCA, has been actively involved as an officer in the Applied Computational Electromagnetics Society (ACES), Eta Kappa Nu, International Union of Radio Science Commission B, IEEE Wave Propagation and Standards Committee, and an Associate Editor for the Radio Science Journal. He has patents for the 3D-Frequency Independent Phased Array and for a low-profile antenna for AM broadcasting called the Kinstar. He invented a concept for HF and higher frequency Yagis called the Optimized Wideband Antenna (OWA). He consults on a project using HF antennas and propagation analysis for what is known as high frequency stock trading to beat the speed of fiber optic lines by using the ionosphere at HF.  He also is very active in the Radio Club of America on the Board of Directors, Technical Symposium Chairman, and has received the prestigious Sarnoff Award in 2017 and has also received the very prestigious Ulrich Rohde Award in 2024.  He has been a very active Amateur Radio operator (WA3FET) for 60 years and has given many talks for this community.