Antenna Swapping?

Just ordered a xAC v2.

I don’t need it for anything, just wanna play with it. However, I don’t really like the flat antenna. Especially as it has no case / housing.

If I want to replace the antenna, can I select one (assuming I can find / build it ) with one of the same inductance and be good to go?

I might pull the original xAC antenna off and measure it, just for kicks.

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I suggested the same thing on the dangerous things beta on Facebook. Im gonna see what I can do with it. I want to do the same thing for it car mod

I was casually flipping through mouser the other day. They’ve got a lot of antennas. Just need to know what I’m looking for and see if there’s anything I like in that range.

This is the spec for the v2 antenna

Antenna specifics: 125kHz 543.2μH 7.93Ω

If you can find something close to that it should work just fine

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To my understanding, yes. However the chances of finding one are pretty low, antenna swapping usually results in poor performance due to the mismatched inductance.

If you’re happy to wind one yourself and have a device to measure the inductance as you go, you should have great success.

I haven’t measured the V1 antenna, but i doubt you’ll be that lucky.

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You are too modest @Compgeek , if you’re not going to link it, I will

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695 uH
3.0 Ohms

Just throwing that out there for the next poor lost soul.

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Thats great info @ODaily
I will try and find somewhere for that in the forum :+1:

There’s alot of random places on the forum containging various specs for xAC both ver 1 and 2. Might be worth making a thread to consolidate all we know regarding specs.

Unfortuneatly, you seem to be correct. I’ve done some digging and found very little. The couple I did find that were ifffy close, are entirely the wrong unit otherwise.

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My thoughts exactly, I have some stuff to do, then I’ll throw something together in the projects category

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The product pages should be that place. The specs for v2 came from the product page because I realized that people might want to do exactly this… so anything new that comes up, I’ll post to the product page as the definitive repo for that product.

Thats cool and easy, is it worth also having access to the xAC V1 info?

9-15V
11mA idle
48mA when reading

etc

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So in this case, you’d have to lower the capacitance of the board to match the higher inductance of the v1 antenna. You could mod the board or possibly add a cap in series.

Yeah, but there’s also other stuff that kinda all goes together. Like the V2 product page doesn’t list the 3rd jumper, and there’s this product sheet that Compgeek found.

There’s a bunch of advice on setup too. Best practices with diodes and relays, etc.

I DID finally score a wildly overpriced Logitech C920 Webcam. I originally intended to make a series of videos for the V1. Maybe I can put something together when it gets here and collect all that into a single reference post.

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