Dual antenna HF + ProxLF mod for the Proxmark3

[anon3825968]

@Satur9

Something is better than nothing. Fear the feature creep.

Providing 2 antennas for a device that has 2 antenna outputs isn’t feature creep.

@Satur9

I think Tom did a great fucking job making the proxLF with very few resources.

Absolutely. This is not in question.

@Satur9

I understand that adding a HF trace antenna around the LF coil antenna visually appears to be simple.

That’s… because it is

@Satur9

The antennas interact with each other.

I highly doubt it, considering one is a coil coil with many turns of copper wire and the other is a planar antenna with 2 turns, that orient their respective EM fields 90 degrees to one another.

@Satur9

adding a trace antenna doesn’t solve the problem of it working with implants. We would need a second HF coil antenna

That’s true: the ideal combo for us implantees would be 2 coils. But that is definitely harder to design, and more expensive to make.

Look, I ain’t bitching. Tom’s work is top-notch, and if he hadn’t picked up the ball, nobody would have gotten any LF coil at all. No question.

But seriously, if you go to all the trouble of designing a PCB (and a curvy PCB at that) with a complex coil and transparent cover assembly on top of it, it literally costs peanuts to make that PCB square, add a couple traces around the perimeter, and a cap. You know, as a fallback that’s better than nothing, and no worse than the stock antenna for HF.

I’m guessing Tom was focused on the LF design and didn’t think of that. And again, I’m not criticizing. All I’m saying is, it was doable, and not terribly challenging technically or financially.