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Getting a 433MHz antenna going

[...]

It was a client so he was my boss only for one day :-)

With some clients the faith in expensive name-brand lab equipment has been shaken. For example at one where I waltzed in armed with a laptop and a piece of wire with a 3.5mm phono jack. We used one of their safety transformers for audio line isolation and via the sound card found a noise peak that a $10k Stanfrod Research analyzer was unable to see. At first they wanted to discourage me. "But we've already looked with a high-end audio analyzer". After unexpectedly seeing the peak on my laptop screen some expletives slipped out ...

Finding the source of it was then only a matter of minutes.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Reply to
Joerg
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So let's see... I can go into business selling $10k test equipment with so-so performance or become a consultant and have to be successful using $10 improvised sensors and a laptop.

I know which business I'm going into!

:-)

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Correction: It was a snipped off cable with molded phono jack on there, salvaged from an old stereo tower. So it was $0 :-)

Ok, the laptop is a ruggedized one, not so cheap.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Use another domain or send PM.
Reply to
Joerg

Whimpie is giving you the best advice here. If it were me since you are feeding the antenna with what sounds like a tri-plate line, I'd actually build an SWR detector right into the drive line! YOU can use that to measure SWR and that lets you trim antenna length for minimum SWR. As Whimpie notes, depending upon what is on the board, proximity of ground planes etc. Impedance may be quite low. So some kind of matching is needed. Also some tuning of the end of the antenna may be needed to get some efficiency. In short because of the nature of the geometry there is going to be a considerable amount of trial and error here to get this to work best. While at these frequencies it's likely you'll get something that "sort of" works regardless, I'd recommend getting help from someone experienced in antenna design at these frequencies.

Reply to
Benj

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