 This week's IonMPI is Towglass. Towglass, yes. This is a really cool Irish company that makes a lot of antennas. In fact, you've probably used their antennas. I have before they make ones for GPS and Wi-Fi and cellular and all sorts of stuff, but this week in particular we are highlighting their multi-band SMT antennas. These are ceramic antennas that you can pick in place to come on a tape-and-reel and they have a massive wideband. This one in particular the PA760 wideband is 600 to 6000 megahertz which covers a wide number of bands as shown here basically 4G, 5G, 3G and 2G including Wi-Fi as well. I mean basically kind of anything really between 600 and 6000 and you need this because and I was wondering like why do you need so many bands? Well, I'm used to cellular stuff you know when I was first designing cellular stuff with the CIM 800 this is a GSM GPRS module. So GSM otherwise known as 2G covered the whole world with basically quad band although honestly it's really dual band because you know 850 and 900 megahertz and 1800 and 1900 megahertz are pretty much the same frequencies and they're also multiples of two. So you know getting an antenna that could cover those two bands basically 900 and 1900 megahertz was not too bad. You know we have one in the store that's that's very inexpensive that covers both and has I think two DBI gain and that was wonderful and great except that 2G is no longer used in North America and a lot of parts of Europe. Instead we have you know I'm skipping ahead to LTE which you know you're probably familiar with because your phone is a LTE phone well guess what there is like you know basically 100 bands available for all of the different speeds and bandwidths and ranges that people are expected to use. 100 bands? It's wireless Palooza. I know so you know a lot of this is you know go through all of these some of these of course more popular than others but countries have different bands available and also depending on a category of LTE you know there's there's categories zero category 1M up to category I think four or five the higher the category number the usually the higher the frequency and the higher the bandwidth is for you know transmitting video audio you know high-speed internet whereas the lower categories category zero category one those are used for machine to machine stuff and you know with the low-cost 2G network used to do when you just wanted to send temperature data over cellular or you wanted to you know have a credit card processing machine that just sent authorizations over cellular you don't have to have a very good quality high-speed connection because it's only connecting very rarely it connects to the cell you know the cell network verifies the credit card and then disconnects so for that you might want a less expensive lower power cellular module that uses the LTE network and you might want something that has better range because you know it's it's okay if your fancy cell phone maybe doesn't work in you know a basement eatery but we've been to restaurants where when you go downstairs there's no cell phone service but you know if you if you have a alarm system or a fire you know detection system or a credit card processing system that uses cellular well it needs to work everywhere and so those categories zero and category one bands might use something as low as 900 megahertz 600 megahertz to get really good penetration through walls and through wood and through you know even some thin concrete but again you know it's lower frequency you're not going to be able to carry as much data but you will be able to carry it a lot farther also good for rural areas so this is an example also of you know I looked at another SIMCOM module it's an LTE module that gave that I've you know views before and it's LTE but also has GSM fallback and that's pretty common too so even if you're not necessarily if you're expecting to use LTE you know in some countries there might be GSM as a fallback capability especially in some rural areas that still have GSM or 2G that's another reason why you might want to have multiple bands so this is the antenna or a very similar version of this antenna as an example on a dev board by TauGlass and so this is actually kind of like an IoT all-in-one edge sensor platform thingy and you can see that you know having an SMT antenna is quite nice because first off it's not that large compared to I mean it's big but it's not that large compared to the cellular module and it allows you to have like a weatherproof design or an enclosed design without like this like jangly antenna sticking off of it this could be you know so what I thought was interesting is you know if you have and a cellular module that can do cat zero cat 1m up to you know and as well as looks like maybe they have Wi-Fi or Bluetooth as well this could be handy for some projects some of the projects that they had as an example was if you have a horse farm so let's say you have a horse farm and you're in you know the Irish countryside and you want to track the location of your horses because their horses they run they run very fast they run very far but maybe you want to kind of know where they are sort of on your property so you have a GPS module you need to get that GPS tracking data back to you but again you're in a rural area so you might want to use a cat 1m or you might want to use GSM to get the best range but then also when they're closer to the farmhouse you might switch over to Wi-Fi where you don't have to pay for roaming charges and that's where you know a multi-band antenna could also come in handy if you could switch you have an antenna switch and you switch between cellular and Wi-Fi or maybe you also have Laura Wann and you have a horse mesh network all sorts of ideas sometimes you have to keep track of the temperature of the horses their heart rate there's a lot of things you have to keep track of yeah so they do have they actually did a horse monitor project which I think is a great example of IOT your wild horses yeah so so that edge where I think this is the same board as we showed before and this was used for a project called horse pal with with a company that I think makes horse blankets I mean there's nothing there's really nothing quite more romantic than than having horses in the Irish countryside and you're you're riding them and caring for them and then monitoring them with LTE Cat 1M modules so yeah these modules you know they would slip into the horse blanket and you could use them to locate your horses and also just make sure that they're all doing okay and they're moving fine and here is right sir I love my horse and I keep track of my horse this is the co-CEO of Towglass and I think the blue thing he's holding is is the module I think you know one has the battery on one side and the other side is the edge module you see it's in case in silicone to keep it waterproof because horses you know they are they can roll around in the mud so you have to make something that is not going to get dirty or you can't have like an SMA connector word which could come loose which is why it's handy to have your antenna embedded inside so if you are excited for an SMT mount antenna well you're in luck because there's quite a few models that have them are currently in stock at Digi-Key, Velbel Digi-Key, including the PA 7760, that's right, she's also called the Warrior X wideband, at the time of this screenshot in 2,576, the band of frequencies is as wide as a horses butt yeah and there's a little horse video but you know I have to be careful with some of these sales videos because they use music so we're just gonna we're just gonna show you the video so this is the you know doot-doot-doot this is the music this is the logo okay and then this is the horse and then there was just like drum horse for that's the name of it yeah and it wasn't there was no horse sounds it was just music so I decided yeah you're not losing out on anything with with horses okay well there you go so Taglas thank you so much for inspiring you know I always go to the videos of the company and sometimes I just like to pick the coolest one not necessarily like exactly the video about the antenna but it there was an antenna in that horse blanket so it's it counts okay and that's I on MPI