ESP8266 Community Forum

- Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:24 am #717 Thanks for the lengthy CV of Mar.
Don't get me wrong I didn't wanted to discredit him or his work. I was just wondering why certain things are made as they are.

Still I won't do a PCB stripe Antenna on my board. I have done such Antennas , I have did such Antennas for commercial products (With all the CE/FCC/E1 etc etc fuzz , but that doesn't relate to an Antenna tbh, usually your Antenna isn't that good that you will exceed the limits on radiated energy. And if so you push down the TX a bit in the firmware until you met the goal ...) , and I don't like them.
I can qualify and tune such Antennas at my home "mancave" quite well and have all the necessary tools for that at my hands (SA@home,VNA@work).

My point on the Dev Board is to get something working and not to spend evenings on tuning an Antenna for optimum performance , and that would likely happen

So with an SMA connector the PCB is quite flexible , I took electronika_ba's suggestion ,and to some extend yours, seriously and I will put an integrated Antenna on the PCB as well.
I will go the 'lazy route' and will use an part which I think I can handle without too much work involved (The Molex LDS one..)
I really don't care if the integrated Antenna costs me $1 (LDS) or $0 (PCB) in parts , as this is for sure no volume product the LDS one comes me cheaper because it will probably save me some hours on tuning.

- Fri Sep 19, 2014 1:51 pm #762

I suspect those issues you see don't have any real effect on the antenna performance or he would fix them.

Unlike Claude I don't build antennas for a hobby (yet ), but I can assure you Claude's not bullshitting you. Antennas are pretty sensitive things, and changes in the dimensions, positions or in the properties of the substrate will most certainly affect the performance. Either Mar is using a high-quality PCB manufacturer or he's just ignoring the variation in performance.

Probably the latter, with an antenna design that minimizes the adverse effects of production imperfections. "Good enough" is usually fine for prototyping.

- Mon Sep 22, 2014 5:39 am #815 Just send out the Gerbers for PCB fabrication.
The PCBs should show up in about two weeks from now



I will probably get around 10 PCBs but only need 2 or 3 .
So when there is interrest (and only if the PCB works!) I might sell the remaining PCBs , as a bonus I can cut a stencil (plastic foil) too.

Boards will be 6 Euros each
Stencil 3 Euros each

Shipping costs :
Germany : 2 Euros
Rest of Europe and US : 4 Euros

- Mon Sep 22, 2014 5:43 am #816 Can you post schematics in PDF somewhere?