Gregory's Servercontinuing on, @hennichodernich suggested i try out OpenEMS. it's a bit hard to use; i can't just sketch out the shape of the antenna and use it. i have to create it with code, but that code means it can be parametric. here's what the resulting antenna looks like.
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 the sim appears to work, S11 looks reasonable. it's dead on at 2.4GHz. now i'm curious as to why i had to shorten the antenna on the PCB so much. perhaps the dielectric thickness didn't match up, or maybe the trace was too wide (i didn't cut it precisely to 1mm)  @tubetime Did you calibrate out the effects of the thin coax cable? @tubetime It could also be caused by the anisotropic material (eps_z neq eps_xy) which FR4 is famous for most likely it is a difference in dielectric constant, slight dimensional differences, and the coaxial cable interacting with the VNA calibration. i calibrated to the end of the blue cable but this doesn't account for the thin coax. the antenna doesn't have a matching network either which will have an impact.  figured out the problem! I neglected to include the thin coax in my calibration. it's much better now, I've even restored it nearly to the original length, and the impedance match looks better as well. open and short at the end of the coax was easy but for the 50 ohm load I had to solder this tiny smd resistor. another way is to calibrate to the end of the SMA cable and use the "electrical delay" setting. this didnt work well for me. I'm used to larger, more professional VNAs that let you adjust it with a knob and watch the Smith chart in real time. the NanoVNA makes you play a game of Guess-The-Number... @tubetime you should be able to measure the electrical length with the far end open (or shorted) by measuring the phase and halving it. Would be nice if the tool could do it for you though! I have some QoL ideas like this I keep meaning to try implementing in my nanoVNA after using it at work a bit @Darius yes it might actually be good enough to do it that way. i'll have to experiment some more. @dtelder it's 50 ohms but it is longer, so the calibration plane needs to move. @tubetime @dtelder i'm not 100% sure myself about why it caused a frequency shift, but you may be right about it being part of the antenna. the ferrite beads along the thin coax are supposed to prevent RF currents from flowing along it, but it's not perfect.  @tubetime a couple of weeks ago I tried to make a 1.7GHz patch antenna, I got the resonance right after the second try but until today I haven’t figured out why the impedance is wayy off…  @tubetime isn't a venv easier to get to work than system python... @whitequark how many versions of python exist on an average desktop ubuntu install. hmm @tubetime probably one? system python is there for system packages and not for you, counterintuitively (which is the cause of much confusion and strife. I wish it wasn't on PATH given that...) @whitequark maybe analogous to using a cross compiler vs the system compiler. @tubetime I'm used to rustc and clang, which make no distinction between the cross and native compilers >.> (to be fair, there is a little bit of magic in native clang that tells it where to find the libs, but also I wish it wasn't needed...) @tubetime @hennichodernich There is gerber2ems which might be helpful (https://github.com/antmicro/gerber2ems) |
side note, to get openEMS to work, i had to downgrade my numpy version to 1.26.2. (yes, i know i'm supposed to be running Python with venv in a chroot jail in a Docker container under vmware, but i just want software to work...)