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What is the most difficult antenna problem you had to deal with?

rscasny


Antennas are perhaps the most difficult thing of a wireless design.

The test equipment to measure signal and radiation costs a lot of money.

Even with simulations, you still need to measure, test and refine under realistic environmental conditions.

There is no such things as a one-size-for-all antenna.

There are short range and long range, internal and external, simple and complex antennas.

If you have designed antennas or wireless solutions, what was the most difficult thing you had to deal with. (If you have an antenna horror story, we think we'd all like to hear about it.)

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  • Well, I've had quite a bit of fun with antennas of all sorts - from DIY dipoles and Yagis for amateur/satellite applications, to compact antennas for digitally modulated silicon radios (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, LTE), to broadcast FM radio/TV and satellite. Meeting all the requirements is not easy - microwave work is still considered a "dark art" to me.

    That being said, I guess my antenna story would be to do with the changeover to digital TV which required higher-frequency coverage than most already-installed antennas. The log-periodic was a natural choice, as they were compact and wide-bandwdth. Just one problem - the tapering elements, reducing in thickness didn't seem to please the local wildlife, so our magpies and crows started bending them and picking them off. That was not fun to replace!

    I did some work servicing an amateur radio ground-station crossed-yagi on a rotator. That was pretty cool, except for the fact it was a giant construct and would be prone to jamming the rotator when the winds got too strong. Getting into satellite TV, truing up a dish to make sure it was properly focused and properly aligning the LNB in terms of position and skew is always a bit of a challenge. Pointing is the easy bit, even though even that can be tricky when your dish isn't all that big and you're trying to catch a buried feed that's intended for a much larger dish. In the past, I've had fun chasing analog weather satellite (APT) transmissions with a homebuilt QFA and chasing AMSAT AO-51 Echo similar amateur "easysats". But unfortunately, time is perhaps the more limiting factor.

    More recently, I've been working on a few smaller projects involving LoRa - finding antennas that perform well but are compact can be difficult depending on the band and the radiation pattern + gain requirements. Unfortunately, when it comes to designing PCB-based antennas, almost anything can affect its tuning, to the material in use and the consistency of the manufacturing. It's hard to know we have an optimal solution, so usually we settle for "it works well enough." Otherwise, we stuff a connector onto it and use a commercial antenna ...

    - Gough

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  • Well, I've had quite a bit of fun with antennas of all sorts - from DIY dipoles and Yagis for amateur/satellite applications, to compact antennas for digitally modulated silicon radios (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, LoRa, LTE), to broadcast FM radio/TV and satellite. Meeting all the requirements is not easy - microwave work is still considered a "dark art" to me.

    That being said, I guess my antenna story would be to do with the changeover to digital TV which required higher-frequency coverage than most already-installed antennas. The log-periodic was a natural choice, as they were compact and wide-bandwdth. Just one problem - the tapering elements, reducing in thickness didn't seem to please the local wildlife, so our magpies and crows started bending them and picking them off. That was not fun to replace!

    I did some work servicing an amateur radio ground-station crossed-yagi on a rotator. That was pretty cool, except for the fact it was a giant construct and would be prone to jamming the rotator when the winds got too strong. Getting into satellite TV, truing up a dish to make sure it was properly focused and properly aligning the LNB in terms of position and skew is always a bit of a challenge. Pointing is the easy bit, even though even that can be tricky when your dish isn't all that big and you're trying to catch a buried feed that's intended for a much larger dish. In the past, I've had fun chasing analog weather satellite (APT) transmissions with a homebuilt QFA and chasing AMSAT AO-51 Echo similar amateur "easysats". But unfortunately, time is perhaps the more limiting factor.

    More recently, I've been working on a few smaller projects involving LoRa - finding antennas that perform well but are compact can be difficult depending on the band and the radiation pattern + gain requirements. Unfortunately, when it comes to designing PCB-based antennas, almost anything can affect its tuning, to the material in use and the consistency of the manufacturing. It's hard to know we have an optimal solution, so usually we settle for "it works well enough." Otherwise, we stuff a connector onto it and use a commercial antenna ...

    - Gough

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