Who is concerned about the new antenna design?

[troop231]

You, sir, were correct. You might as well be wearing a t-shirt that says "I told you so."

I might get some t shirts made with a pic of the iPhone 4's antenna on it lol!

 

[Jack2345]

Yes, you certainly do become part of the circuit. But not in a good way. Your body doesn't magically increase the effective radiating area of the antenna, it makes the impedance go crazy. Antennas are difficult enough to impedance match properly, but as soon as you touch them you add an enormous amount of capacitance to the circuit. At these frequencies, the impedance goes WAY down and received signal power is lost, while transmitted signal power is reflected and could even potentially damage the power amp.

And cell reception is one thing... received GPS signal power is absurdly low. Good, sensitive receivers will be able to lock onto and track a signal at -160 dBm or so. Having a non-precision hunk of metal as the antenna rather than a ceramic helical antenna is really, really dumb. Get enough oil on it and you won't be able to track.

I wish Apple would put out a statement in layman’s terms for the benefits of this design so people wouldn't be so worked up.

I'm an RF engineer with an EE degree and 10 years of experience. By touching the antenna your body becomes part of the circuit, essentially making one large antenna. This improves reception considerably. Remeber old rabbit ears on your tv? You use to move them with your hands, when you touched them the picture was clear, as soon as you let go it got worse? It made it hard to tune them in. Same thing applies here. The bars decreasing when touched is a software glitch because the impedance has changed on the circuit, the software is simply calibrated to not being held.

As far as shorting it out, some simple isolation barriers take care of that, so no worries.