All the pads marked in red have continuity, that's where the center conductor of the antenna goes. So where should the outer shield connect? Ground? Nowhere?
Continuity at DC means nothing to microwave signals… you do need to find the proper places to connect the cable. Many antenna designs have shorted stubs in them. They look like a short circiuit at DC, but at the resonant frequency of the antenna have the proper impedance for maximum power/signal transfer.
Also, I think that a lot of the problems with range that they are having with the Asgard is due to the fact that they cobbled an external antenna onto the board and left the old antenna behind. That is going to create a huge mismatch and eat a lot of signal…
Or radio signals of any frequency.
Had to do that anyway to fit it where it needs to go...
You’ve just sliced off the antenna 
That is all part of a resonant circuit.
It has to use an external antenna on the end of a little piece of coax to work in a flashlight, the onboard antenna won't work unless the light is completely disassembled.
If I recall center & shield are the 2 pads along the edge. Just find a picture of the driver with the external antenna connected to be sure. Can’t quite see it in Foy’s.
I believe it could be seen in JohnnyMac pics.
Is this actually remote controlled driver? Could you tell more about it. What’s the voltage rane, output current, type of driver (boost or buck), dimensions, price tag, avaliability. Been looking for something like this for a while and even ’been thinking about making one myself. Could be very useful for a biking helmet light with remote switch on the bars.
My concern is, are the drivers in the complete lights assembled correctly? It doesn't make much sense to copy the wrong way to attach the antenna.
For fun, I just glomped both conductors in the coax together and then onto the same pad, and it works at a range of about 12 feet or so, didn't try farther than that but it's just out in the open air, not installed inside a light.
Toaster, these are bare drivers from the FLEX Asgard - http://www.fasttech.com/products/1355500
Bluetooth programmable modes, but in use it's controlled with a normal clicky switch.
So this is actually not what I’m looking for.
You can just use a piece of wire and save your coax in that case.
Exactly my point, and the reason this thread exists. This is the way it's done in the preassembled lights and how they said to do it for the replacement drivers they sent out for the first lights that had driver problems. Yet, I still don't know what the ground shield should attach to.
Should it go to ground? At the antenna end of the coax, both conductors are soldered to different spots on the same trace. Is that wrong too? Would grounding the shield at the driver end render the antenna useless? Well, more useless than if it used a plain non-shielded wire?
The stripped end you show in your first pic is the antenna the rest of the coax is just the feed line, the coax braid should go to the earth on the board, which I can’t tell in the pic. I’m not really into microwave stuff.
From what I know about antennas which isn’t much. The shielding is exactly what it says, shielding. It stops all interference from entering the inside wire where the signal is carried. If you where making a antenna with shielded wire you would strip the shielding because no signal can get to the inside wire, its being blocked by the shielding. I all so think it just goes to ground to absorb the unwanted signals which are picked up and carried by the sheilding.
My confusion comes from this: look at the pic in post#6. Up at the antenna end, the shield (drain) is soldered to the lower bar on the antenna, and the center conductor is soldered to the upper bar on the antenna. But the antenna is one contiguous piece of copper. I can't see how the center conductor & drain aren't carrying the same signal, and that grounding the drain at the driver end wouldn't just dump all the signal to ground.
If the drain were floating at the top end, then I'd have already put this together and would understand how it's supposed to work. I can see how the drain connected to ground at the bottom, and floating at the top, would dump unwanted interference to ground as a normal shielded cable does. As it is I cannot see how this setup will shield anything at all, and cannot see how the attachment method in the 'instructions' (both conductors glomped onto the same pad) can function any different than a plain unshielded single conductor wire.
I located JohnnyMac’s thread , and your right it doesn’t appear to be connected correctly. Though hell, it works & I’m certainly not 100%. RF has been called a black art, a lot of variables & difficulties to learn in order to really tune designs. Could look up the chip, maybe its above class 1, providing spare power to work even with the improper antenna connection.
RaceR86 posted a clearer picture of the pads (hope he doesn’t mind if I borrow it).
I marked the locations. All ext antennas I’ve seen are connected as such.
:beer: Thanks. OK, that's at least plausible.
The ‘shield’ doesn’t act as a traditional shield in many antennas.
Shielded wire is meant to carry a signal with out picking up any unwanted signal. When making a antenna no shielding is used or it couldn’t pick up any signal.
So the way they have it looks wrong, the green antenna picks up the signal plus any unwanted signals and is carried to the driver through the shielded wire.
The center wire should be all that is connected on the green antenna and at the driver signal input, the center wire would be the signal input with the shielded wire only connected to ground on the driver. To me that would be the correct way. The reason would be if the driver was giving off some kind of rf noise then the shielding would pick it up and send it to the signal input the way they have it. With the shielding isolated (from the center wire) running to just ground, it would be picking up the driver rf noise and running it to ground. No rf interference unless it comes from the remote green antenna.
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Just my thoughts. 