Chip Antenna Recommendations

[David Day]

Please provide recommendations (Supplier & Part Number) for chip antennas that have been used successfully in actual released FCC/ETSI certified Nordic-based product designs.

[Håkon Alseth]

Hi,

Antennas are so application specific that I cannot point you to a specific antenna and say that this will work for your custom design. What you will have to do is to evaluate the size and space that you have available and see which antennas meet your specification.

In our reference designs we use normal 1/4 wave PCB antennas (in a "L" shape or meander), so we cannot give you a specific recommendation for chip antennas as we do not have that much experience with them.

If you have a look at chip antenna manufacturers site (Johanson, Murata, etc), you can sit down and look at the size specification and how they should be implemented, to see if they match your requirements. Any 2.4 GHz antenna would do.

Note that you will always require external components to tune your antenna (regardless of type) into 50 ohms. This is normally done by adding a PI-network: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_tuner#Pi_network

Best regards Håkon

[Bastiaan]

Hi,

I'm curious why you want an antenna that's been used in FCC/ETCI registered designs?

There is very little correlation between your choice of chip antenna and passing these regulatory tests. (Within reason -- obviously you need to start with a chip antenna made for the wavelength and bandwidth of BLE to start with).

A bigger worry is from noise, harmonics, etc. from the rest of your board.

I believe, but your Nordic sales rep can confirm, that you can submit your final board design to Nordic and they will help you tune your antenna including the Pi network.

I'm in the middle of doing a whole whack of regulatory testing right now -- if you have specific questions from a customer's perspective, I'd be happy to try and answer them.

-m

[Guest]

Hi,

I'm curious why you want an antenna that's been used in FCC/ETCI registered designs?

There is very little correlation between your choice of chip antenna and passing these regulatory tests. (Within reason -- obviously you need to start with a chip antenna made for the wavelength and bandwidth of BLE to start with).

A bigger worry is from noise, harmonics, etc. from the rest of your board.

I believe, but your Nordic sales rep can confirm, that you can submit your final board design to Nordic and they will help you tune your antenna including the Pi network.

I'm in the middle of doing a whole whack of regulatory testing right now -- if you have specific questions from a customer's perspective, I'd be happy to try and answer them.

-m

[David Day]

Thanks. I do understand that there is much more to a successful certification, but I thought it might help if there were chip antennas in known working designs that could be referenced...

[Håkon Alseth]

I'm sorry, but we do not use any chip antennas in our reference designs/eval kits.