Book excerpt: The recent impetus to produce rigorous solutions to more realistic models of pertinent propagation problems, over a wide frequency range, has generated the need to derive full wave solutions to problems of radio wave propagation in dispersive, inhomogeneous, anisotropic and dissipative media with irregular boundaries. The considerable growth in civil and military interest in the development of more reliable systems for communication, detection, navigation and positioning, the potential for developing radio wave methods for remote sensing and the need to develop secure hardened communication systems have contributed much to this renewed interest. These developments have been paralleled by remarkable advances that have been made in the availability of high powered, very low frequency electromagnetic sources as well as the availability of transmitters operating at optical frequencies. The ready access to large, versatile digital computers has made it possible to employ the rigorous full wave approach to obtain numerical solutions to a wide class of important problems which have hitherto been either ignored or over-idealized in order to reduce them to tractable problems. The results of these investigations have been presented in 50 technical articles which include published manuscripts, computer program papers and invited and contributed papers at international conferences.