Antenna Installation; Antenna Requirements - Quectel LTE-A Series Hardware Design

Figure 41: Coplanar Waveguide Design on a 4-layer PCB (Layer 4 as Reference Ground)
In order to ensure RF performance and reliability, the following principles should be complied with in RF
layout design:

Use an impedance simulation tool to accurately control the characteristic impedance of RF traces to
50Ω.

The GND pins adjacent to RF pins should not be designed as thermal relief pads, and should be fully
connected to ground.

The distance between the RF pins and the RF connector should be as short as possible, and all the
right-angle traces should be changed to curved ones.

There should be clearance under the signal pin of the antenna connector or solder joint.

The reference ground of RF traces should be complete. Meanwhile, adding some ground vias around
RF traces and the reference ground could help to improve RF performance. The distance between
the ground vias and RF traces should be no less than two times as wide as RF signal traces (2*W).
For more details about RF layout, please refer to document [7].

5.4. Antenna Installation

5.4.1. Antenna Requirements

The following table shows the requirements on main antenna, Rx-diversity antenna and GNSS antenna.
Table 37: Antenna Requirements
Type
1)
GNSS
EG18_Hardware_Design
Requirements
Frequency range: 1559MHz~1609 MHz
Polarization: RHCP or linear
VSWR: <2 (Typ.)
Passive antenna gain: >0dBi
Active antenna noise figure: <1.5dB
LTE-A Module Series
EG18 Hardware Design
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