I am planning on making a board which will have some 2.4GHz RF capabilities, and would like to know if there is a cheap way to tune an IFA cheaply.
If I had access to the right equipment I could easily tune the antenna, but at the moment a multi-thousand dollar VNA is a pipe dream.
Is there anything that can be made or used on the cheap to get a crude antenna tuning going for this board?
Also something I saw which was interesting, on the antenna design specification it claims that no external matching components are needed. I'm assuming it would still be desired to have a pi network to deal with detunings caused by anything else on the board or in the environment right?
Best Answer
The antenna design already includes a matching network. If you need to adjust it, you would fiddle with some of the dimensions given in the design. If you don't know how to do that, just leave it well enough alone.
Adding a second lumped-component matching network would probably add more problems than it would solve, and lead to greater losses than living with whatever mismatch you end up with by using the design as-is.