Mishka

Admin, may I ask you to simulate the batwing antenna as a feed antenna to offset parabolic mirror please?

Why not? I'm open to any solution. By the way, to me the Batwing antenna looks like a biquad modification. From the simulation data it doesn't look superior to the biquad though, except it has slightly wider bandwidth.

I understand that it's about the system in a whole. The higher gain of the feed antenna doesn't mean better system when placed in the focus of a parabola. If the reason why the simple Bester is better is not because it's easier to build, but rather it results in better antenna, I'll be happy with it. But if the antennas with higher directivity may help to achieve more gain in an offset mirror, the build complexity must not be an issue either. My experiment is about setting kind of a record for Bluetooth Long Range, so I really don't want to loose those extra 3 to 6 dB from the link budget if I can :-) So which one is best, the simple Bester or the original Bester?

Oh! Have some more questions, but to keep the biquad topic clean please see my reply in the "Bester Antenna".

[Moved from the Biquad Antenna] Taking in account it's for an offset mirror, would having more directors improve anything? I've noticed there is the slightly bigger 3G antenna. It would be cool to reach more than 25 dBi gain.

Many thanks for the advice! I'm going to build the following one. Will post questions / updates to the "2.4GHz yagi" topic.

Reading here and there I found that the Bester antenna may be another option. For 2.44 GHz there are two designs, with one director (9.5 dBi) and with seven directors (14.5 dBi). Any thoughts, how is the Bester in comparison to the biquad? Which one is be better for a satellite dish?

I'm going to use a pair of cheap offset satellite mirrors of about 80 cm diameter. Looks like most of them were designed with F/D ≈ 0.5, hence the feed antenna should fit vast majority of its radiation into 90 degrees beam. I don't expect the mirrors will be of high quality, but I believe they're big enough to compensate some errors. Also, I'll try to align focal points. The link budget with monopole omnidirectional antennas (I assume 0dBi) and +8dBm PA on transmitter side is 104 dB which results in about 1600 m of theoretical range. I hope to break this 2 km barrier with directional antennas first (supposed to be +10 dBi each) which hopefully results in 5+ km range. And then with the satellite dishes (hope to achieve +25 dBi per node) to reach 10 km. Unfortunately, this is the maximum distance in my area where I may have more or less clear Fresnel zone. There is also 20 km line of sight, but there is a hill between the points.

Pretty much agree, thanks for the point. This will probably to decrease it by 1 dBi or such. So I could laser cut it from a copper plate instead. But this means that a different model needed. Also, I think that I'm going to fix the biquad to the reflector with two plastic struts, and for the feed line I'll use an SMA bulkhead extension cable from Amazon, like this one https://www.amazon.com/Bingfu-Bulkhead-Cellular-Amplifier-Transmitter/dp/B07MJQWH8S On the board side there is the U.FL connector.

Hello, first of all, please let me thank you for sharing the designs! This is absolutely stunning what you guys are doing here. I'm working with Bluetooth 5 enabled microcontrollers, and for an experiment want to build a long range symmetrical setup using vanilla nRF52840 MCU (+8dBm max). To break 2 km range, I'm thinking about a couple of offset dishes 1m diameter (expect to reach +25dBi), and looking for a suitable feed horn. I have noticed your biquad and batwing antenna designs. Both do promise about +10dBi gain, with the biquad a little bit narrower and hence with better directivity. I ilke that they can be manufactured on FR4 which means high reproducibility and hence low error margin. Also, I'm going to further tune the antenna with matching network to better match my source. However, I've noticed that the DXF / Gerber files (cited above) are not fully correspond to the dimensions on the CST screenshots listed for a very similar 2.44 GHz design - DXF / Gerber is bigger. Could you point me to the most decent model for 2.442 GHz, please? Also, may be there a better option to take the feed horn role? Thanks!