Saturday, 30 June 2018

How to ground wi-fi antenna outer wire on circuit board connector?


enter image description hereI have a quick question regarding a Wi-Fi antenna modification I am doing to my drone controller. I want to replace the antenna which is soldered to the board in the controller. I want to replace it with a SMA connector, so that I may mount an external antenna instead.


My question is: how do I ground the outer wire on the circuit board? Is it okay to run a wire carrying the outer wire current to GND? Or do I have to use the antenne ground? Where would I find that? enter image description here



Answer



There's no proper wiring of the return path on that board. If you connected the shield of your external antenna "somewhere" to GND, you won't get an external antenna but just a long internal+external antenna wire.


Find the WiFi PHY chip (could be that one near to the existing antenna) and check which pin is HF ground. Your cable shield goes there.


EDIT: Oh yes, and Marcus is right, wire antennas are often enough not 50Ω impedance so you may need an impedance matching transformer.


No comments:

Post a Comment

arduino - Can I use TI's cc2541 BLE as micro controller to perform operations/ processing instead of ATmega328P AU to save cost?

I am using arduino pro mini (which contains Atmega328p AU ) along with cc2541(HM-10) to process and transfer data over BLE to smartphone. I...