Saelig Introduces Low-Cost SMD Antennas

Saelig Company, Inc., announces the availability of the Proant OnBoard SMD 2400 (2.4GHz band) and SMD GPS (GPS and GLONASS) miniature surface-mount (SMD) antennas for mobile wireless products. The OnBoard series moves embedded antenna integration one step ahead by combining high performance and low cost in this new OnBoard SMD family, the company said.

Traditionally, small low-cost antennas for printed circuit board assembly have been manufactured with a dielectric substrate as the base for the radiating structure. With this approach, the antenna is normally a rectangular block, which means that the PCB area below the antenna is unavailable for mounting other components. Another drawback is that the substrate itself introduces dielectric losses to the antenna, reducing its total efficiency.

Proant has taken the concept of small SMD antennas one step ahead by increasing both the antenna performance and design flexibility, and combining this with low cost and manufacturability. The result is the new OnBoard SMD antenna family, which builds on previous OnBoard antennas, but in a surface mounted sheet-metal solution, packaged in tape-on-reel and suitable for high volume manufacturing. One of OnBoard’s key features, which eliminates the need of the dielectric substrate used in other SMD antennas, is the patent-pending capacitively-loaded footprint of the antenna’s supporting pins, which significantly reduces losses and increases the performance.

The first two products to be launched in this 50 ohm RoHS-compliant family are OnBoard SMD 2400 (2.4GHz band) and SMD GPS (GPS and GLONASS). Future variants will include WLAN dual-band, 868/915 MHz, and GSM versions.

“We wanted to simplify antenna integration for our customers,” said Tomas Rutfors, CEO of Proant. “The solution was to make a simple product that satisfies both engineering and sourcing needs. With the OnBoard SMD family, we have defined a new product segment, which didn’t exist before.”

Made in Sweden by Proant AB, a widely respected specialist antenna company in the M2M and wireless market, providing a wide range of embedded and external antennas, OnBoard SMD 2400 (2.4GHz band) and SMD GPS (GPS and Glonass) are available now at under $1 (1000 pcs) from Saelig Company, Inc., the USA technical distributor. A demonstration board is also available at $35.