Taoglas unveils 'patch-in-a-patch' antenna

Dubbed the HP5354.A, this is an antenna that offers dual-band stacked patch performance in a standard 35 x 35 x 4mm form factor as the second antenna is recessed into the first, without stacking the parts.

The new passive, dual-feed surface mount design (SMD) reduces antenna height by 50%, decreases weight, and saves horizontal real estate, making it an ideal solution for GNSS applications demanding precision and accuracy with limited space.

The HP5354.A is a drop-in replacement for single-band surface mount patches, improving the IoT device’s positioning accuracy from 3 meters to 1.5 meters without compromising the dual-band L1/L5 performance.

Designed using a custom electro-ceramics formula, Taoglas’ surface mount antenna technology ensures high-quality performance and seamless integration into devices requiring high-precision GNSS.

Applications, such as asset tracking, smart agriculture, industrial tracking, commercial drones, and autonomous vehicles, require better stability, resilience, and precision.

For decades, the industry has used single-band GPS, but emerging bands such as L2, L5, L6, and L-band offer designers a path to cleaner signals, improved gain, and cm-level accuracy. The same trend applies to global GNSS technologies, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou, QZSS, IRNSS, and SBAS.

“Taoglas has been designing and manufacturing reliable, high-performance GNSS antennas in-house for over 20 years, and we remain committed to investing in new antenna technologies,” said Dermot O’Shea, CEO at Taoglas. “We know electroceramic patches are still the most efficient way to receive circularly polarized signals, and before Inception, multi-band configurations required a stacked patch antenna, which adds to height and weight. The HP5354.A—our latest innovation—means you can move to dual band without changing the footprint, size, and height of your current single band GPS antenna.”

The Taoglas HC125A hybrid coupler can be used to combine the dual feeds for L1 patch offering high RHCP gain and optimal axial ratio for upper constellations including GPS L1, BeiDou B1, Galileo E1, and GLONASS G1.

Active circuitry needs to be upgraded to L1/L5 along with the antenna. The Taoglas TFM.100B L1/L5 front-end module can be designed onto the device PCB alongside the antenna to reclaim valuable real estate and save designers up to two years of complex design.