This time it’s not about antennas or anything related to radio-frequency, this time it’s a, probably controversial, topic that I’ve been looking and discussing with some folks for at least a year, and it is related to Electric Vehicles (EVs). As an electronics engineer, I am a technology advocate in general, however, with regards to EVs, I don’t like the way they’re being advertised as the grand solution for mobility in detriment of everything else, and specially I don’t think the best way to make EVs with environment in mind is the EVs the automakers are developing, I honestly believe EVs are a green solution for mobility, but I think most automakers are perverting the concept. I warned you this post was a controversial!

Alright, welcome to the third and last post about the GEN I Active GNSS antenna design saga. In this one I’ll post about the actual results obtained from the constructed antenna. And show you a monumental blunder I committed when designing both PCBs, but I’ll save stupid stuff for last. Next time I must remember to only start posts when I have the full project done and tested, but well, living and learning. But first, I’ll briefly explain something I forego in my previous two posts concerning the impedance match of the amplifier and was asked by a friend who happen to read this blog.

Alright, here we are for the second part of the GNSS active antenna design. This time it didn’t took so long to get a new post release into the blog. I guess it’s because I haven’t been doing any online courses or anything, so more free time to play around with

Once again, it’s been a long time. I should really devote more time to this blog… Well anyway, let’s get back to business! This time I’m posting about a little project I’ve been doing to support some activities at work. So, we’ve been working on some stuff with GNSS, but this time the receiver is designed to operate with an internal antenna as well as an external antenna, which can (should) be active and it is supplied through the coaxial cable. It is supplied through a dedicated LDO and has a bias tee network in place, so that it is perfectly isolated from the rest of the circuit to avoid noise from our circuit to sneak into the GNSS chain and screw the reception.

Hey there folks. It’s been a long long time since I updated anything on this blog. I thought there was no real reason to not update this more frequently, but now that I think about it: There’s been a side project, from which I cannot disclose anything, I’ve also spent more time with physical conditioning and with learning music, and most probably because I’ve spent most of 2021 dedicated to do online courses. This post is my attempt to break the cycle, however, the problem is that I have dedicated less time to studying new papers or anything interesting related to engineering, hence I have no topic on Antennas or RF to put up. Still, I realized that the purpose to start this blog was to get me to write more, because it is something that I like to do, and since it is my personal space, I can use to write about anything I deem interesting and it doesn’t necessarily need to be about antennas anyway.

I’ve been cooking the change from blogger to a GitHub pages for a while. My blog, as well as my small personal projects, have been stalled for more than half a year now. Honestly, I don’t really know how to explain this absence and lack of time for anything. Somehow today I finally got the time and disposition to tackle this task and get back to do what should have been done quite a while ago. To setup my personal page on GitHub pages and migrate the content of my blog to my github pages.

Hello folks. There’s been some time since I’ve written my last post. I’ve been very busy with work and other side projects, which eventually will find their way here, but since they’re far from completion, I thought to make a smaller post about a subject that is useful and I’ve had had in my notes for a long time. So I figured I’d just put it up on the blog so it could be useful as reference for someone, or even myself one of these days.

A while ago I promised to look into the effects of using VIAs (Vertical Interconnect Access) on RF tracks to change layers on PCBs. Unlike the 90º degree bends on PCB tracks, in this case there’s essentially two postures about the matter. Either people are completely clueless of the potential risk of placing a via on a RF track and do it recklessly. Or they’re somehow a little aware of the risks, therefore completely demonize such practice, going at extreme lengths such as increasing the track sizes immensely (making it even worst), just so to avoid the use of the via.

To continue on the topic of the printed quadrifilar antennas, as promised, this post will be about the feeding network. Last post I’ve shown the antenna part and a quick explanation as to what the feeding network should look like, this time I’m going to cover the power distribution network that makes it all work. More specifically, I’ll explore an alternative that allows the antenna construction to be more compact and with better performance.

Hey there folks! Today I’m heading back to the RFID reader antennas topic. This time, I’m covering another typical antenna found in these readers, which is the quadrifilar antenna. In this particular case, a printed implementation of the quadrifilar antenna.

Hey there folks. Today I’m going to talk about curves in PCB tracks. I’ve seen a few topics here and there trying to demystify the way that tracks should curve in order to avoid all sorts of magic stuff. There seems to be a large consensus about avoiding 90º degrees bend at all costs, then there’s a lot of people already claiming we’ve been doing stuff based on tradition only and that there’s no solid reason nor practical argument to not use 90º bent tracks. So I thought I should give my two cents on this subject. If you want to indulge in such a discussion, check out this EDA stack overflow thread.

In the first post of this blog, I pointed out to this video about a guy discovering the wonders of UHF RFID and proposing to build his own antenna. Unfortunately for me, I discovered he knows little to nothing about antennas, and his demand has been fully about trying to replicate an already made design. That’s unfortunate for me, but doesn’t mean the video isn’t good. On the opposite, it is splendid and extremely educational. I knew all about the stuff he was talking about, and I still found it very entertaining and learned one or two other things in the process. But then I decided I could actually write a post about designing a UHF RFID tag antenna.

So, as I mentioned on my last post, here I’ll explain about those rings around the feed points on the microstrip antenna. Those rings are copper cutouts around the feed point of the antenna. Those cutouts, at high frequencies, are equivalent to a capacitor. That capacitor is used to compensate the series inductance that is introduced by the higher order modes being driven.

This is a continuation of my previous post on the air core microstrip patch antenna. It can be found here. At this point, we need to get the patch to radiate a circularly polarized wave (and correct the added inductance of the feed pin by the increased height).

As I mentioned on my previous post, today’s post will be about the good old microstrip patch antenna.

This is the first official entry to the blog!