About a month ago I bought a 1090MHz PCB aerial on eBay and immediately forgot about it. It arrived a few days ago and I had a good look at it before I connected it to anything to try and work out what it actually was. I decided from the construction that it was a vertical half wave dipole.
As with all new aerials, I decided to put it on one of my analysers so see how it appeared to perform. I chose the straightforward vector impedance analyzer (sic) rather than the full VNA due to the simplicity.
I was very surprised to see the SWR showing as a disappointing 6:1 on the analyser.
I did a visual inspection of the aerial which showed that one side of it wasn’t even soldered – Effectively this was working as quarter wave vertical with no groundplane whatsoever.
I fired up the soldering iron and it only took a few seconds to fix this.
You can see that both sides are now nicely soldered in place to the board. With that done, I put it back on the analyser again and it showed a much more pleasing SWR curve.
For completeness, I also tested the aerial on my VNA. The marker here is at 1090 MHz and shows an SWR of 1.22:1. I do appreciate that SWR on a receive aerial isn’t anywhere near as important as when one is transmitting but at least it’s a good indication that the aerial is resonant on the required frequency.
I haven’t yet had a proper chance to test the effectiveness of the aerial but I expect it to be a bit worse than a simple quarter wave vertical with radials (spider). The main reason for this post is as a advisory – If you’ve bought one of these types of aerials then it’s worth checking to make sure that it’s actually soldered properly.
Beware cheapie bits from China eh? A simple enough fix though curious as to what you’re using it for. Pi relatedness?