subject: Advice About Chip Antennas And Chip Antenna Ground Planes Featuring The Echo 11 Chip Antenna [print this page] Chip antennas are brilliant because they are small, low profile and fix into ever smaller handheld devices where there is narrowly limited space, they make micro designs possible. Chip antennas also can provide excellent reception and transmission capabilities, which is the main functionality of any antenna. Very small embedded chip antennas enable us to make devices connect to numerous networks wirelessly.
Chip antennas are the smallest type available for GPS and are quite popular in small handheld devices. However, chip antennas are linearly polarized, giving them a 3 dB disadvantage and making them more receptive to multipath signals (which could degrade the accuracy of the computed position in some cases).
In order for these antennas to effectively radiate or receive energy when used as transmitting or receiving antennas, they need a ground plane of an appropriate size. Chip antennas have very specific ground plane requirements. Chip antennas all require a specific PCB size. Usually, at least one edge of these PCBs should have a minimum of a quarter wavelength at its operating frequency. This does of course mean that chip antennas are only as small as the PCB that they require allows. The antenna vendor can provide assistance in this area and can possibly tune the chip for a specific application.
Chip antennas are sensitive to other components in a circuit layout and have relatively less isotropic radiation patterns. You should read the chip antennas datasheet, to ensure that you select the right chip antennas for the job.
Ceramic chip Antennas providing even better wireless performance, transmission rates, stability technology automatically avoids channel conflicts using its channel selection feature.
The Echo 11 allows easy integration into small devices and is specifically tuned to provide optimal performance for 2.4GHz ISM equipment. The 2.4GHz PCB antenna is based on an efficiently tuned PCB element that is matched and embedded to work with a wide variety of RF modules operating on the 2.4GHz ISM band frequency.
Popular in Bluetooth, Zigbee and WLAN embedded applications; the antenna allows users a longer working range than a standard on board chip antenna which is offered on many modules. Connected via an Ipex (UFL compatible) connector and 100mm cable the antenna PCB measures just 45 x 10mm ensuring a compact design which can be discreetly fitted in many of today's products where space is at a premium.
