Antenova Offers Free Tool to Optimise Antenna Placement on a PCB

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With no particular goal in mind, a 120 mm x 120 mm test PCB was used as a test. The Antenova Antenna Placement Tool allowed five Antenova antennas to be placed as shown, one each for 4G, ISM, GPS/GNSS, 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. The number of antennas is evidently limited by board size and bands used.

- RF Cafe

Hatfield, UK, 6th May 2021 - Antenova Ltd, the UK-based manufacturer of antennas and RF antenna modules for M2M and the Internet of Things, has created a new software tool to help designers place antennas in a wireless design. The tool displays the optimum position for embedded antennas on the PCB, depending upon the dimensions of the PCB and the specifications of the antennas. It places each individual antenna on the PCB in the best location for signal strength.

Antenova has developed this tool to assist product designers who do not have access to antenna skills in-house. The tool should help designers to place the antenna in the best position early in the design process and achieve a working wireless design more easily. It can be used for one single antenna, or up to three antennas.

Antenna placement becomes more complex when there is more than one antenna in the design, as each antenna needs to be able to radiate correctly without causing interference to the others. With this in mind, Antenova has created the tool to position up to three antennas from different categories or a pair of antennas in a diversity configuration.

Antenova's placement tool will be valuable for designers creating layouts for the small PCBs within some of the latest trackers and mobile devices. As well as showing the best position for the antenna, the tool displays the "keep-out" area adjacent to the antenna, which must be kept free of other components. Like this it will help designers to pack components as closely as possible and save space in the design.

"RF engineering skills are in short supply, and not all designers have access to antenna specialists, so we are offering our Antenna Placement Tool to help designers start their wireless design and achieve a successful layout first time round."

Antenova Ltd is a leading developer and supplier of high performing integrated antennas and RF solutions for wireless communication, consumer electronic and wireless M2M devices.

Antenova's broad range of standard antennas and RF modules are ideally suited for GSM, CDMA, 3G, 4G, LTE, 5G-NR, NB-IoT, GPS, GNSS, WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, LP-WAN, LoRa, Sigfox, Weightless-P and ISM, for M2M and IoT applications.

One of Antenova's latest antennas, the Robusta chip antenna from the company's ROBUSTA range, for use on metal surfaces and IoT applications, was the winner of the Hardware Award at Embedded World 2018.

Antenova provides comprehensive design advice and technical support, including custom antenna design, engineering, integration and test services to ensure the best possible performing antenna solutions for customer devices. For more details, please visit www.antenova.com.