4G antenna halves the groundplane to shrink tracker designs

Antenova Ltd has halved the footprint of its 4G cellular antennas with its latest offering, the Pharaoh SMD antenna.

Created for small PCBs, the antenna covers all 4G frequencies: 698-824MHz, 824-960MHz, 1710-2170MHz, 2300-2400MHz and 2500-2690MHz.

The antenna's small ground provision delivers designers a considerable advantage in designs on a small circuit board, such as wearables, miniature pet trackers or OBD-II designs.

This antenna has been tested with evaluation boards of 50mm x 40mm and 60mm x 40mm, and its performance-to-footprint ratio out-ranked competing 4G antennas for small circuit boards. They generally need a minimum of 60mm x 40mm of space, use extensive and costly band switching networks and display lower levels of efficiency.

Critically, the antenna's performance on small PCBs is above the level needed to pass PTCRB tests for cellular networks.

Michael Castle, product marketing manager at Antenova Ltd, explains: “The performance of an antenna is directly related to the length of its ground plane. At the lowest 4G frequency, 698MHz, the wavelength λ for electromagnetic radiation is 42.95cm. Most antennas require a ground plane of a quarter wavelength, which means they need a space of 107 mm to operate effectively. Our Pharaoh antenna smashes this rule and uses about half of this area.”

The company supplies the antenna with a reference design and matching network to assist integrating the antenna into a device and shorten the design cycle.