chip antenna vs meander antenna

[geekEE]

I have a 2.4 GHz application where the chip vendor has provided info on both a chip antenna and a meander antenna implemented as a PCB trace. They said that the range would be about the same with either design. It seems like the chip antenna would take less space and the meander antenna would be cheaper.

Are there any other advantages to one or the other that I should be looking at? Repeatability? Compliance? Tuning? Something else?

Glenn

 

[mwebster]

I went through this a few months ago.

Trace antenna's take up more board real estate but can be significantly better than a chip antenna if tuned properly. You need to look not just at the board space available but also what the enclosure is going to look like, how close it comes to the board, the material. In my case, one side of the link was a remote control, so I had to consider the placement of a human hand holding it as well, righty or lefty.

Chip antennas tend to be omnidirectional(ish) in only one plane. For the ones I looked at, that was usually the XZ plane which meant I would have to mount it vertically (perpendicular to the ground) to get the best radiation pattern from it.

Either way you go you're going to need to tune it once it's in its final enclosure to get optimal sensitivity, so you need to make the design with an eye towards that testing. It's amazing how much an enclosure can throw off your center frequency. Of course, if you're only looking for a short link (say 20 feet, no obstacles), then you can possibly do without tuning.

You might be able to get layout help from the chip antenna vendor's application engineers that wouldn't be there for a trace antenna, so that's a plus.

Oh, one other thing, trace antennas can be balanced but chip antennas are always unbalanced. Depending on what the chip is putting out that can mean the design (or use of a reference design) of a balun for the chip antenna where the trace might just hook directly to the balanced terminals.