antenna tuner for nRF9160

[bruno_ibaceta]

Hi everybody. nWP033 shows antenna tuner examples mentioning ATU but not giving any direction to which device/manufacturer.. I have just found 32CK417R and 32CK301R from Cavendish Kinetics’. Anybody knows how to buy them? or other manufacturer with ATU ? Thks

[Kaja]

Hi,

here you can download the Thingy91 HW files. We use an antenna tuner setup here, with QM12038.

Best regards,
Kaja

[bruno_ibaceta]

Hi. Thks for your reply but Thingy91 uses as a tuner several matching networks (one for each frecuency). As you are well aware, when you have your final design it is needed to tune the antenna for each frecuency and that is very much easy to do it with a "low loss digital programmable variable capacitor" (please see https://www.fractusantennas.com/files/AN_FR01-S4-224_SmarVat.pdf an excellenet application note and very good explanations). In that way, you just need one network which includes a programmable variable capacitor which you program (for each frecuency of your interest) the correct value for tuning the complete network. However in that applicatio note they just use Cavendish-Kinetics programmable variable capacitor (company which was recentrly acquired by Qorvo), and they don't show any place where to buy their programmable capacitor and I haven't found them in all major parts wholesaler. So question remains: Anybody knows how to buy them? or other manufacturer with similar programmable variable capacitor with similar characteristics? (there are a few from ST and other but they are "voltage programmable" not digital and also the voltage goes from 0 to 25V to set the capacitors value.. so for an IoT design is no very useful actually.

BR, 

Bruno