antenna recommendation

General
1

hello,
Does anyone have any recommendations for external antennas to use with the halowlink1 in a bridge configuration? One will be mounted on the roof of a moving vehicle, with the other as the base station.

thank you,

2

Welcome!

I don’t have any specific recommendations, as I haven’t had much time for racing of late. My general recommenation would be to look at 900MHz offerings from Laird, MobileMark, or Taoglas. A quick search of Mouser comes up with a couple of options from Laird.

My general preference is for fixed, radome style antennas. Whip antennas will be an easy way to get some extra gain, but the whip swaying in the breeze may cause our rate control to react adversely.

3

ok great thank you for that.

Do you think this would be suitable?
ENG_DS_ANT_DS_M6_STUD_VEHICULAR_WHIP_ANTENNAS_A-3359157.pdf

or better to go with this one?

ANT-DS-5GPhantom1021_2.pdf

Please excuse my ignorance, I am very out of my depth with RF stuff!
thanks,

4

I was thinking something more like https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/TE-Connectivity-Laird-External-Antennas/TRAB9023N

It gets you a couple of dB more gain than the wide-band antennas intended for LTE, and is a little cheaper.

The popularity of Helium mining means that there are cheap omni antennas for the base station side all over Amazon. I haven’t done much testing with these yet, but I did pick one up to play with recently.

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5

ok thanks - have ordered

6

We have had great luck with MP Antennas across all spectrums. I am in process of ordering a set of these for my 3 units.

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7

Just an update on this as we ran in an event over the weekend at Collie here in WA.

Overall the system worked pretty well I think. Some info on the setup/environment below:

  • The car used a TE/Laird TRAB9023N mounted directly on the roof
  • The base station was placed on the edge of the roof over the pits (approx 2.5m above ground level) and used the antenna supplied with the halowlink1
  • The telemetry maintained connection for most of the track except the area shown in red in the screenshot below
    colliecoverage
    colliecoverage905×1251 83.9 KB

I did walk around a bit with the base station plugged directly into the laptop to try and find a better spot but the results were similar. Probably stating the obvious here but it was quite sensitive to the orientation of the base station antenna (it needs to point upright!)

I didn’t get a chance to do any proper throughput testing due to some issues with the car. We put a hole in a piston two hours into day 1 and had to change the engine, then threw an accessory belt on day 2, overheated the new engine and blew a head gasket!

I will look at one of the helium antennas for the base station as suggested by @Zandr to try and improve coverage before the next event.

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