Notice, that antenna in thesis has 110x110 mm reflector and 59.7 x 46.8 mm rectangular patch. It is classical higly directional linearly polarized patch antenna. Kyocera GNSS antenna is of very different type - non-directional non-patch small size antenna. It's operational principle and method to obtain dimensions is described by PIFA/Inverted-F theory.
These things are crazy, I powered up a UBlox GPS receiver module with one of these patch antenna a week or so ago after it'd been sat for nearly 3 years and it acquired lock in less than a minute while sat on my desk indoors.
Ahh , very cool idea. I was wondering how to keep everything in sync - if you'd have to connect to wifi or setup some kind of interface to set the time.. Wheras a tiny thing like this, easy !
Nice find, thanks :) As a satcom engineer, this is more in my wheelhouse, though I've generally been working more in the Ku and Ka bands at 12/14 GHz and 20/30 GHz. The company I work for has a variety of phase array antennas of different flavors as well as the typical reflector types. Sitting in on design reviews for these is really interesting if you're in to this stuff.
GPS signals are right hand circular polarized. Does the offset of the feedpoint make this a RHCP antenna? It seems it might look the same in a mirror though. Two corners of the patch are "chamfered". Is that relevant to the handedness?
hmm i feel like trying to remove the glob of solder and smearing it out slightly might be bad for the antenna. XD (though in my case my non working antenna now works.)
I always take the GPS receiver, set the serial to 9600 baud and let the Arduino write it all to variables. Then I throw that on a display. I just built a clock that adjusts itself.
Nice use of the GPS satellites' internal rubidium standard if you don't have one. :) Might actually want to integrate that into a GPSDO with an OCXO, this way if you lose the GPS signal the clock will still maintain accuracy, only at a lower level than in the presence of the GPS signal. (edit) FWIW, if you use the u-blox software you can set the PPS signal to be any subdivision of the receiver's internal 48MHz (not just the default 1Hz), and you can use that signal directly for the adjustment. Integer dividers of 48MHz work best as the have the lowest jitter. I routinely set my GPS receivers to output 1MHz this way. Feed that into a PLL together with the OCXO signal and have the PLL generate the correction signal back into the OCXO. A CD4046 or the fancier 74HC9046 work well for that purpose.
@@stamasd8500 I had the same realization, regarding using the GPS as a reference, without the rubidium. So, I built a GPS clock, as Jens Schoder suggests, with a PIC MCU, and added external wiring connectors, to use for calibrating instruments.
Another GPSDO option is to send ~$100 to the online seller, and a very lovely GPSDO shows up a few weeks later. Built-In super high quality 10 MHz OCXO (almost certainly salvaged, = aged LOL), and a uC and GPS to discipline it. I have one, and it's super nice having such precise and traceable 10 MHz and 1 PPS on my desk. It's emotionally upsetting when the red 'Alarm' LED comes on for whatever weak-signal or power outage reason, but it regains lock pretty quick, and back to Green. Highly recommended.
I made some helical antennas from scratch, they work pretty well when connected directly to the receiver. I hear the amplifiers on patch antennas actually add quite a bit of noise (the GPS signals are so incredibly faint) and are useful mainly for compensating for the loss of relatively long coax.
Today my drone crashed and this ceramic Antenna of the BN-880 GPS module came off. It doesnt have the golden connector like in this video, but it seems it was directly soldered, is there any way I can re-solder ? it is so small I cant see in my eyes or is this completely damaged ? iNav is detecting my GPS and also in-built magnetometer but not able to get a 3D GPS fix. Please anyone help.
Im interested anyone figured out how you could mod say a ublox usb gps to use an external far larger antenna i have a very nice external gps antenna that id like to use with the usb adapter for ham radio when portable and at home but looking at the pcb i can't seem to figure out how exactly id go about connecting the coax of my external antenna or is it just a case of center to center of existing antenna and ground (braid) to ground ?
Interesting. I always thought that this type of GPS antenna was passive. Nope, there's an op amp. I would like to see a tear-down of the black plastic type, that is marketed as powered... Round, black plastic puck, magnetic bottom, long cord... Please and thank you. I have such and it does work much better, inside the house, than the ceramic model...
Those types of rectangular magmount antennas are likely just a ceramic patch antenna just like this one, only its covered in a black plastic radome so it can be mounted externally
@@sweatbruh2513 I humbly offer that is not correct. The powered antennas get much better reception, indoors. I have had both. The plain puck did not work indoors. So, I bought the powered type. The powered antenna does work indoors and readily acquires multiple satellites. The powered ones are cheap and worth the little bit of extra money, IMO. HTH.
@@t1d100 you can get passive and active gnss antennas, with or without a plastic radome. From my experience most of the pucks have an active ceramic patch in them. Ive done quite a few teardowns and have found this to be the case but it depends on the manufacturer, theres a lot of overspec’d antennas out there that don’t actually perform as stated on the data sheet
@@sweatbruh2513 That is really good information. I humbly defer to your greater research. I have bought several of each and I have been fortunate in that the powered, black, plastic units that I received were the cure for the poor reception problems that I was having. Because they all worked as expected, I never tore one down. And, I would not have the knowledge base, or the equipment, to analyze their performance. Knowing the extensive problem of faked electronic components/equipment, your findings are not surprising. Do you have a YT channel? Just yes, or no, as YT will not allow you to post a link... I would look it up by your user name. This has been a great conversation and I appreciate that you shared with me so kindly.
Once you consider the ~0.8 mm fringing field around the edges of your antenna, the dimensions match pretty well. Quite possibly, this thesis is the blueprint for your antenna. Practical considerations always demand empirical adaptation of theory to the particular purpose at these frequencies. Incidentally, it is the fringing fields that actually radiate and receive.
Thesis "Design and Analysis of Microstrip Patch Antenna Arrays" is irrelevant to this particular antenna. Thesis describe patch antennas, WxL = 59.7 x 46.8 mm. a = 24.1 mm its an edge gap (minimum safe reflrector size at least lambda/4 from patch edges). Total antenna dimension in thesis is minimum 84 x 71 mm (actual Ahmed's prototype was 110 x 110 mm) Patch antenna is highly uni-directional (with peak directivity 8...9 dBi and high supression of backlobes. GPS ceramic antennas on market aren't of patch type. They are of PIFA/Inverted-F family: they have isotropic directivity (no uni-directional gain) and they are ultra-compact.
there 3 parts to a paper for a degree or a masters degree 1. you tell them what you are going to tell them 2. then you tell them 3. you tell them what you have already told them 🤣😋🥴
Thank you very much for the link to this thesis. It is right in my area of interest and I look forward to reading the gentleman's work.
Notice, that antenna in thesis has 110x110 mm reflector and 59.7 x 46.8 mm rectangular patch. It is classical higly directional linearly polarized patch antenna. Kyocera GNSS antenna is of very different type - non-directional non-patch small size antenna. It's operational principle and method to obtain dimensions is described by PIFA/Inverted-F theory.
These things are crazy, I powered up a UBlox GPS receiver module with one of these patch antenna a week or so ago after it'd been sat for nearly 3 years and it acquired lock in less than a minute while sat on my desk indoors.
Very cool!!
I use them on my many Nixie clocks!
Ahh , very cool idea. I was wondering how to keep everything in sync - if you'd have to connect to wifi or setup some kind of interface to set the time.. Wheras a tiny thing like this, easy !
Very good video. The reference thesis is quite good.
Amazing video, mate. Thanks a lot ❤️
I love things made from ceramic. Such a nice but underused material.
Nice find, thanks :) As a satcom engineer, this is more in my wheelhouse, though I've generally been working more in the Ku and Ka bands at 12/14 GHz and 20/30 GHz. The company I work for has a variety of phase array antennas of different flavors as well as the typical reflector types. Sitting in on design reviews for these is really interesting if you're in to this stuff.
Wizardry. This stuff is like black magic.
GPS signals are right hand circular polarized. Does the offset of the feedpoint make this a RHCP antenna? It seems it might look the same in a mirror though. Two corners of the patch are "chamfered". Is that relevant to the handedness?
hmm i feel like trying to remove the glob of solder and smearing it out slightly might be bad for the antenna. XD
(though in my case my non working antenna now works.)
I always take the GPS receiver, set the serial to 9600 baud and let the Arduino write it all to variables. Then I throw that on a display. I just built a clock that adjusts itself.
Nice use of the GPS satellites' internal rubidium standard if you don't have one. :)
Might actually want to integrate that into a GPSDO with an OCXO, this way if you lose the GPS signal the clock will still maintain accuracy, only at a lower level than in the presence of the GPS signal. (edit) FWIW, if you use the u-blox software you can set the PPS signal to be any subdivision of the receiver's internal 48MHz (not just the default 1Hz), and you can use that signal directly for the adjustment. Integer dividers of 48MHz work best as the have the lowest jitter. I routinely set my GPS receivers to output 1MHz this way. Feed that into a PLL together with the OCXO signal and have the PLL generate the correction signal back into the OCXO. A CD4046 or the fancier 74HC9046 work well for that purpose.
@@stamasd8500 I had the same realization, regarding using the GPS as a reference, without the rubidium. So, I built a GPS clock, as Jens Schoder suggests, with a PIC MCU, and added external wiring connectors, to use for calibrating instruments.
The RUclipsr "Scullcom" has a complete Arduino project, with the circuit, pcb, code, everything...
Another GPSDO option is to send ~$100 to the online seller, and a very lovely GPSDO shows up a few weeks later. Built-In super high quality 10 MHz OCXO (almost certainly salvaged, = aged LOL), and a uC and GPS to discipline it. I have one, and it's super nice having such precise and traceable 10 MHz and 1 PPS on my desk. It's emotionally upsetting when the red 'Alarm' LED comes on for whatever weak-signal or power outage reason, but it regains lock pretty quick, and back to Green. Highly recommended.
@@JxH
I made some helical antennas from scratch, they work pretty well when connected directly to the receiver. I hear the amplifiers on patch antennas actually add quite a bit of noise (the GPS signals are so incredibly faint) and are useful mainly for compensating for the loss of relatively long coax.
Is it possible to convert these to 1.7 GHz?
Today my drone crashed and this ceramic Antenna of the BN-880 GPS module came off. It doesnt have the golden connector like in this video, but it seems it was directly soldered, is there any way I can re-solder ? it is so small I cant see in my eyes or is this completely damaged ? iNav is detecting my GPS and also in-built magnetometer but not able to get a 3D GPS fix. Please anyone help.
try sphere mimo phased array
Im interested anyone figured out how you could mod say a ublox usb gps to use an external far larger antenna i have a very nice external gps antenna that id like to use with the usb adapter for ham radio when portable and at home but looking at the pcb i can't seem to figure out how exactly id go about connecting the coax of my external antenna or is it just a case of center to center of existing antenna and ground (braid) to ground ?
I love this channel because it bridges science and electronics. Keep up the great work sir! 👍🏻
Interesting. I always thought that this type of GPS antenna was passive. Nope, there's an op amp. I would like to see a tear-down of the black plastic type, that is marketed as powered... Round, black plastic puck, magnetic bottom, long cord... Please and thank you. I have such and it does work much better, inside the house, than the ceramic model...
Those types of rectangular magmount antennas are likely just a ceramic patch antenna just like this one, only its covered in a black plastic radome so it can be mounted externally
@@sweatbruh2513 I humbly offer that is not correct. The powered antennas get much better reception, indoors. I have had both. The plain puck did not work indoors. So, I bought the powered type. The powered antenna does work indoors and readily acquires multiple satellites. The powered ones are cheap and worth the little bit of extra money, IMO. HTH.
@@t1d100 you can get passive and active gnss antennas, with or without a plastic radome. From my experience most of the pucks have an active ceramic patch in them. Ive done quite a few teardowns and have found this to be the case but it depends on the manufacturer, theres a lot of overspec’d antennas out there that don’t actually perform as stated on the data sheet
@@sweatbruh2513 That is really good information. I humbly defer to your greater research. I have bought several of each and I have been fortunate in that the powered, black, plastic units that I received were the cure for the poor reception problems that I was having. Because they all worked as expected, I never tore one down. And, I would not have the knowledge base, or the equipment, to analyze their performance. Knowing the extensive problem of faked electronic components/equipment, your findings are not surprising. Do you have a YT channel? Just yes, or no, as YT will not allow you to post a link... I would look it up by your user name. This has been a great conversation and I appreciate that you shared with me so kindly.
🌟
Once you consider the ~0.8 mm fringing field around the edges of your antenna, the dimensions match pretty well. Quite possibly, this thesis is the blueprint for your antenna. Practical considerations always demand empirical adaptation of theory to the particular purpose at these frequencies. Incidentally, it is the fringing fields that actually radiate and receive.
Thesis "Design and Analysis of Microstrip Patch Antenna Arrays" is irrelevant to this particular antenna.
Thesis describe patch antennas, WxL = 59.7 x 46.8 mm.
a = 24.1 mm its an edge gap (minimum safe reflrector size at least lambda/4 from patch edges). Total antenna dimension in thesis is minimum 84 x 71 mm (actual Ahmed's prototype was 110 x 110 mm)
Patch antenna is highly uni-directional (with peak directivity 8...9 dBi and high supression of backlobes.
GPS ceramic antennas on market aren't of patch type. They are of PIFA/Inverted-F family: they have isotropic directivity (no uni-directional gain) and they are ultra-compact.
there 3 parts to a paper for a degree or a masters degree 1. you tell them what you are going to tell them 2. then you tell them 3. you tell them what you have already told them 🤣😋🥴
this video is useless