wiki:Hardware/lDirAnt

Version 8 (modified by seskar, 8 years ago) ( diff )

Antennas

In addition to chip antennas on various USB attached wireless devices, three types of external antennas are attached to various RF devices on the nodes.

WiFi Antennas

Most of the internal WiFi devices are attached to dual band, blade style omni-directional antennas shown in Figure 1. These are mounted at the end of the two rods extending at the 45 degree angle downwards from the node harness as shown in Figure 2 with the distance between the two antenna rods (i.e. two WiFi devices) of 26 inches.

Omni directional 2.4/5 GHz antenna Node !WiFi Antennas

These antennas have Ant1.pdf typical donut-shaped shape radiation pattern with an average 2 (@ 2.4 GHz) and 4 (@ 5GHz) dBi of gain.

Multi-standard Antennas

Number of SDR units in the grid have Ant2.pdf multi-band (i.e. multi-standard) antennas covering most of the WiFi and 4G bands. They are mounted on the square plate about 12 inches apart (in horizontal plane) as shown in Figure 4.

Multi-band (4G) antenna Multi-band Antenna Mounting Plate

Electronically Steerable Antennas

4 nodes with USRP X310 devices in addition to standard antennas (WiFI for two internal devices and multi-standard paddle antennas) are equipped with a electronically steerable antenna and a block of RF switches facilitating antenna selection.

The antenna is

Directional Antenna Switching Directional Antenna Mounting

The bank of switches is used to route both WiFi node antenna and can be directly configured as follows if the standard available configurations are not sufficient (blanks indicate the particular switch state does not matter).

ConfigurationSW 1SW 2SW 3SW 4
Node Wifi 0 → standard antennaRF 1
Node Wifi 0 → directional (FCI antenna)RF 2RF 1
USRP RF A → standard antenna RF 1
USRP RF A → directional (FCI antenna) RF 2RF 2
USRP RF B → standard antenna RF 1
USRP RF B → omni (FCI antenna) RF 2

Antenna Switching Hardware

Directional Antenna AM Service is used to manage the antenna switchbox and select which antenna is connected to respective wireless device.

Attachments (9)

  • ESA.jpg (123.1 KB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Directional Antenna Mounting
  • DirAnt-1.0.jpg (44.6 KB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Directional Antenna Switching
  • Ant1.png (827.8 KB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Omni directional 2.4/5 GHz antenna
  • Ant2.png (2.5 MB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Multi-band (4G) antenna
  • Ant1.pdf (535.9 KB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. WiFi Antenna Spec. Sheet
  • Ant2.pdf (6.7 MB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Multi-band Antenna Spec Sheet
  • NodeWiFi.png (127.4 KB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Node WiFi Antennas
  • MountingPlate.png (9.5 KB ) - added by seskar 8 years ago. Multi-band Antenna Mounting Plate
  • APAMSJ-137.pdf (2.0 MB ) - added by jkol 8 years ago.
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