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Measuring the PCB Antenna

A project log for Spy Thing

A tracking device with GPS, a digital microphone, LoRa transceiver, and an STM32 microcontroller.

ville-tiukuvaaraVille Tiukuvaara 06/09/2018 at 16:040 Comments

The revision 3 PCBs are looking good so far. Since there are components on both sides, I soldered one side with the reflow skillet and the other side by hand.

As shown, there are breakaway tabs for a programming header on one side and some broken out signals for debugging on the other. I made the programming header mate with the Nucleo that I've been using as a programmer. It fits nicely:

Back to the PCB antenna. In my last post, I explained how I modified it from a TI app note, and simulated to show resonance at 915 MHz. Unfortunately, I also simulated that the impedance would not be very close to 50 ohms, requiring a matching network. This doesn't seem to be the case though. To measure S11 I soldered an SMA connector at the transceivers's ANT pin, and put a 0 ohm resistor where there is a place for a series matching inductor (L1):

Added an SMA connector to measure S11. C22, L1, and C21 are for a matching network.

I 3D-printed some ABS covers to put around the antenna to add the effect an enclosure. This plastic shifts the resonance and so I printed a few different thicknesses of cover.

A plastic cover around the antenna to add the effect of having an enclosure.

Adding thicker covers shifted the resonance lower, which is what I expected. I decided also to add some ABS material around the rest of the PCB as shown:

ABS taped around the rest of the PCB further shifted the resonant frequency down a bit more.

With this configuration, I found that the antenna was close to 50 ohms! I thought it was too good to be true, but this is the case. Maybe the parasitics from the unpopulated matching network worked out just perfectly to tune to 50 ohms.

S11 for the antenna. It is sensitive to the position of the antenna, as seen by the three traces that correspond to different positions.

The three traces have an impedances of 49.8 - j58.0 ohm, 52.4 - j1.9 ohm, and 49.3 + j17.6 ohm. Pretty much 50 ohms! No matching network required. :)

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