Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Taniwha 1277 days ago
Does it really have a ground plane directly under the antenna?
1 comments
timonoko 1277 days ago
Does not matter. "Wifi needs an external antenna". And indeed there is typical Nokia antenna plug on top right.
link
iamflimflam1 1277 days ago
That’s a bit weird. The built in PCB antenna on the ESP32 is pretty good. You only generally need an external antenna for some applications.

The modules with both the connector and PCB antenna normally hace a jumper resistor to switch between.

link
iamflimflam1 1277 days ago
From the readme:

    Please notice, that the ESP32-module PCB antenna can not be used, an external wifi antenna is required. This is because of space restrictions, the RasPi form factor not allow us to make the board larger, and there is simply no space left for the required keepout area for the PCB antenna.
Shame they couldn’t make it work.
link
gregwebs 1277 days ago
> Because several people mention the integrated PCB antenna, the version 3.2 offer at least a basic use of the PCB antenna. Still, the external PCB antenna is the prefered way to use Wifi with the EsPiFF, now to use the integrated PCB antenna as well. Keep in mind, that the ESP32-WROVER-IB module requires a solder jumper modification before the PCB antenna can be used.
link
stavros 1277 days ago
Also from the Readme:

> Because several people mention the integrated PCB antenna, the version 3.2 offer at least a basic use of the PCB antenna. Still, the external PCB antenna is the prefered way to use Wifi with the EsPiFF

It's nice that they removed the ground plane, it should be fairly good now.

link