Simple broadband planar CPW-Fed quasi-yagi antenna

In this letter, we present a novel coplanar waveguide fed quasi-Yagi antenna with broad bandwidth. The uniqueness of this design is due to its simple feed selection and despite this, its achievable bandwidth. The 10 dB return loss bandwidth of the antenna is 44% covering X-band. The antenna is realized on a high dielectric constant substrate and is compatible with microstrip circuitry and active devices. The gain of the antenna is 7.4 dBi, the front-to-back ratio is 15 dB and the nominal efficiency of the radiator is 95%

Compact broadband coplanar waveguide-fed curved quasi-Yagi antenna

A novel uniplanar coplanar waveguide-fed quasi-Yagi antenna is presented. The originality of this design is because of its feed selection and its elliptical structure and in doing so achieving a wide bandwidth and compact size. An X-band prototype is developed and measures a bandwidth of 40%, with 3.2 dBi gain and 11 dB front-to-back ratio measured at 10 GHz. The antenna is realised on a high dielectric constant substrate and is compatible with monolithic microwave integrated circuits and solid-state devices

Producing the Dutch and Belgian mortality projections: a stochastic multi-population standard

The quantification of longevity risk in a systematic way requires statistically sound forecasts of mortality rates and their corresponding uncertainty. Actuarial associations have a long history and continue to play an important role in the development, application and dispersion of mortality projections for the countries they represent. This paper gives an in depth presentation and discussion of the mortality projections as published by the Dutch (in 2014) and Belgian (in 2015) actuarial associations. The goal of these institutions was to publish a stochastic mortality projection model in line with both rigorous standards of state-of-the-art academic work as well as the requirements of practical work such as robustness and transparency. Constructed by a team of authors from both academia and practice, the developed mortality projection standard is a Li and Lee type multi-population model. To project mortality, a global Western European trend and a country-specific deviation from this trend are jointly modelled with a bivariate time series model. We motivate and document all choices made in the model specification, calibration and forecasting process as well as the model selection strategy. We show the model fit and mortality projections and illustrate the use of the model in several pension-related applications