Hello,
I've designed IFA antenna in Altium as described in DN007 and created a balun circuit from the schematic design of CC2500EM Reference Design (swrr016a). I'm very new to RF designs, as I could understand from application notes and forum posts; this design shall work with the right thickness of PCB. My PCB will be a 2 layer PCB and I'm planning to use only the top layer to be the PCB antenna, for maximum range shall I use layer stacking (use both of the PCB layers?) and shall I use a 50 Ohm transmission line on the connection of antenna after connected to balun circuit?
Thanks in advance,
Ziya
Hi,
DN007 antenna is an excellent choice for 2.4 GHz operation. Just copy the antenna in the reference design onto the top layer. Some of the new antenna reference design which have been released use two layer to increase the bandwidth and to achieve a slight higher efficiency. DN007 has a wide bandwidth and has already high efficiency so there is no need here to use both pcb layers.
Can be a good idea to insert a pi-network between on the 50 feedline for antenna matching purposes. This will guarantee that the antenna mismatching can be kept to a minimum.
Regards,
Richard.
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Hello Richard,
First of all thank you for your fast response. I'll have one more question regarding to the issue, by "pi-network" did you mean the balun circuit design below? And do you think that the schematic design below seems like it'll work well?
Best regards,
The schematic looks fine.
A pi-network could be added after C2134 just as a safety measure if the antenna would be detuned / mismatched by its physical surroundings. DN007 has a good match to 50 ohm so more than likely a 0 ohm resistor is sufficient in the pi-network. If the antenna is detuned then the mismatch can be corrected by the pi-network.