My Asgard driver retrofit into a D cell Mag works fine, AR lens but plastic reflector (stock Mag LED part). It's reliable up to about 10 feet, as if you'd ever need to use it like that.
Yeah it should be fine texas. I used to build yagis. Think of it like bunny ears on a tv set. You can adjust them in and out, doesn’t have to perfectly match. A reciever at those ranges will work. No use in adjusting for impedance because it doesn’t matter. On the transmitter yeah, I’d agree you want a swr as close to 1 as possible (for little loss in tx power)
Or if it was a 2 way street where the button needed confirmation from the receiver. Or like wifi both ways. Then you’d have to try and equal the button end. These are omnidirectional too.
What’s cool about having a optimized directional antennae is you can communicate with a little device say running bluetooth meant for little range, and it looks to the little device you are standing right next to it, when in reality you could be 3 blocks away xd Only downside is directional is hard to optimize in the 2.4 and 5 ghz range. Most of the antennaes I found from China are so far out of spec, it’s almost laughable.
edit for comments below
Aye just read your stuff, It’s only black magic because you haven’t built antennas. The elements get smaller as you go up in the band, but that doesn’t mean it’s much different. I found in antenna building, just bending the wave around the dipole could decrease latency, but that was on the top levels of optimizing output, it wasn’t black magic. Far as this application goes, bet you could probably have no antennae and it would work!
When you see antennas etched into a circuit board, they are almost always for microwave radios. They tend to not be very effective at lower freqs (and not all that good at microwaves). Those 300-400 Mhz radios really like to see 18” or so antennas.
Antenna SWR and matching is just as important for the receiver as the transmitter… except with a bad SWR in the receiver antenna, you don’t risk exploding the receiver due to all that power being reflected back into the device… you just lose a lot of signal strength.
BTW, when I went to college I was a co-op engineer in the Microwave Product Development group of Collins Radio… and microwaves is still jiu-jiu and black magic to me.
They don’t include any data handling, just modulation and demodulation. On the transmitter you put the pin high/low and an output pin on the receiver goes high/low
Unfortunately they are not simple ON-OFF devices. They can only send/receive a modulated signal and the waveform must be balanced (sum of signal high times must equal low times). The receiver has a PLL/AGC circuit that goes gaga if you try and send DC signals.
I use them to control the optical beacon in my rocket launch controllers and use an ATTINY85 to do the modulation/demodulation. I use something like a 500 Hz waveform for a “1” and a 1 kHz waveform for a “0”.
I have no idea why but I can’t post photo’s from google anymore. Given me the 5hits. I separated the boards and took a pic with my mobile but I can’t seem to show you. Even pics I have posted already will not paste again???
The TX housing appears to be too small to hold the board ttrev3 suggested.
I am unable to identify the RF board based on the picture, sorry.
I’d just use the radio as is. We’ve got a good working TX & RX that are already paired. You’ll probably be able to use the regulated supply for the MCU on your new driver board and power the RX with it. If not, we should still be able to come up with another easy solution.
Thanks heaps for the help guys. I was thinking of maybe ordering a small voltage regulator for the receiver now just in case I need it later. The driver has not yet arrived anyway.
Helios- was talking/thinking about discrete regulators, not a pre-built assembly like that BEC. A small BEC is a good thing to have here and will be easy to use.
This is the smallest one I have found, still far more than what's needed to power that little receiver. I use them to run 10v/1A LEDs for car dome/trunk lighting retrofits.
Very likely there will be a spot on the LD-36 that can be tapped to provide power already at the right voltage without adding anything.
LCK were pretty quick with their shipping. I took the liberty of separating the boards to take pics. The smaller board has nothing on the underside. It wasn’t until I was taking the pics that I realized some of the chips had blobs of solder bridging the legs. It isn’t meant to be like this, is it???