Editorial - Quo vadis?

The author considers what new fields of antennas and propagation should the society welcome and foster. New fields or new emphases of old fields have come into view several times during the last several. years and will occur in the future. Signal processing antennas {also called "data processing antennas") have received a tremendous attention, most of it by antenna people. In these arrays the emphasis is on the processing behind the elements with the goal of improving antenna performance in one or more characteristics - usually at the expense of others. Example of these arrays are time-modulated arrays, self-steered arrays, multiplicative arrays, correlation arrays. The concepts can be applied to satellite arrays as well as to ground based arrays. Indications are that very large ground based arrays - for instance - will not operate properly without the use of these techniques due to atmospheric decorrelation. Some papers considering these techniques and applications are going to other journals yet these are antenna system papers. A constitutional revision may be made soon. Should it read: antenna, antenna systems, plasmas and radio astronomy systems? Aren\´t "astronomy systems" a special class of "antenna systems"? It seems to me that, above all we should consider the overall question: Should these antenna systems become the province of "systems" or "antennas."