In a moment of boredom/inspiration, I thought about making a patch antenna for my ADS-B aircraft tracking system. One can make one-off patch antennas from garden variety glass/epoxy FR4 board, but the result will have relatively high loss and it will not be repeatable. In order to simply order batches of antennas from any PCB factory, one needs to use high quality controlled impedance board stock.
The side slots in this design increases the bandwidth a little, but it also reduces the operating frequency, so I'll have to see how it turns out and trim it.
There is a variety of RF board made by various manufacturers (Rogers, Isola, Panasonic...) and the RF parameters are different, therefore once you designed your spiffy new antenna for Rogers 4003C, then you cannot change your mind and manufacture it from Isola I-Tera MT40 - you need a new design.
I therefore made a simple design in KiCAD and submitted it to three PCB manufacturers (Eurocircuits, Ourpcb, Pcbonline), to see which board stock is the most cost effective. This showed me a number of things:
- The board makers do not necessarily have the advertised stock, or
- they may not be set up to actually use it, and
- the prices vary dramatically, as I expected.
The most expensive board turned out to be Rogers 4003C, mainly because the manufacturers want to charge me hundreds of Euros to set up their machines to use it. Here is a little relative cost table with the RO4003C cost as 1:
- RO4003C = 1
- RO4350B = 0.44
- I-Tera MT40 = 0.32
- IS400 = 0.36
- FR4 generic = 0.18
RF boards therefore cost two to four times more than garden variety boards, although the difference becomes smaller in larger quantities and when you order a hundred, it may not matter too much what you make it from.
The prototype patch antenna was made from Rogers 4350, which has the following RF parameters:
- Permittivity Dk = 3.66
- Loss Df = 0.0031
- Dielectric width Dw = 0.508 mm
- Cu 1 Oz = 36 um
The patch is slightly flexible, so it could be mounted conformally with the aircraft skin and the weight is only 23 gram, so the antenna will weigh less than the RF coaxial cable.
Garden variety FR4 board has a loss factor of 0.016 vs 0.0031 of the RO4350 board. This makes a big difference, since you want the antenna to radiate, not heat up like a dummy load.
I measured the prototype board and it was off by a mile and a half - as I expected - with RF, theory and reality never meet in public. So I trimmed it Ye Olde Fashioned Way with calipers, a steel ruler and scalpel, until it was spot on.
The VSWR is now a perfect 1.0 at 1090 MHz, and the 3 dB (half power) bandwidth (VSWR = 6) is about 30 MHz. A patch is very narrow band as you can see on the graph, so you may not need to use a bandpass filter with it - which could save you some money and complexity. This is one of the reasons I opted for this design.
The impedance is almost perfect at 49.7 Ohm.
The VSWR is not too important for a receive antenna, but a good VSWR does indicate that the antenna is probably as good as it can be. In practice I can see a small difference between this patch and one that is 6 MHz off: The good one picks up planes way past Brno (100 NM) and the sad one comes a few nautical miles short.
In one off quantities, a small patch antenna will set you back about 150 Euros - sadly, it is not a cheap hobby...
Question Time
A commenter asked: How do you Tune a Patch Antenna???
Hmm...
The easiest antenna to tune is a telescopic, but when you bump it, it can go out of tune, so I use a permanent marker to draw rings around the joints. One can wipe it off again with alcohol solvent.
A holy antenna made from strips of rigid strapping bolted together, can also be tuned easily by moving the pieces one hole this way or that.
Patch antenna tuning requires some sharp craft tools: A big mug of coffee, steel ruler, scalpel and calipers, pencil and eraser (or sharpie and alcohol), plus a most secret material called Copper EMI Tape.
In general almost anything you do to a patch antenna will lower the centre frequency (Fc), but here are some tips:
- Drilling a small hole anywhere, will lower the Fc by about 500 kHz.
- Coating the antenna with conformal varnish will lower the Fc by about 500 kHz.
- Cutting a 50 Ohm stripline feed into it, will lower the Fc by a several MHz.
- Cutting slots into the sides will increase the bandwidth a little and lower the Fc by several MHz, depending on how deep you cut, about 2 to 3 MHz per mm.
- Trimming 1 mm off the two sides will raise the Fc by about 1 to 2 MHz.
- Cutting off two 20 mm triangles on opposing corners for circular polarization, will increase the Fc by about 60 MHz.
OK, so you cut off too much - that always happens:
- You could resort to cutting the corners to move the Fc far up, or you can add a little bit of metal by sticking some EMI tape onto the antenna, but the effect is not exactly the same as not having cut off too much to begin with...
When is it good enough?
A Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) below 2 means that less than 10% of the power is reflected in a transmit antenna and that is usually good enough. A VSWR of 6, is 50% reflected power and that is the 3 dB bandwidth level.
Remember however that a dummy load has a perfect match and transmits or receives nothing, so VSWR is not necessarily an indication of the antenna efficiency - you have to use low loss (expensive) PCB.
As a dedicated home brewer, you can make a patch with a couple of small pieces of copper that you can slide over the slots with a toothpick and sweat solder with a hot soldering iron to tune it spot on.
The standard trick for a manufacturable antenna is to get some sample stock from a PCB manufacturer, design the prototype patch antenna for a frequency 10% above the desired Fc, then get busy with the ruler and scalpel at the kitchen table, to make the antenna the hard way using your mad craft skillz and trim it with side slots until it is spot on. Then finally, you can measure it with calipers and have a board made - if you are very lucky, then that board will be good enough, without further tuning required.
Herman
Also see:
and
https://www.aeronetworks.ca/2019/03/driving-quad-patch-array-antenna.html
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