 The Great Search brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. Digikey, every single weekly data user, Power of Engineering to help you, yes, you find the things on digikey.com. Later, what are you looking for this week? I'm glad you asked. So last week, we talked about UFL to SMA adapters because we've got this RFM feather and actually, let me pull up the design. One second. People can see how many folders I have on my computer. OK, RFM. OK, so let's go to the computer and I'll show off the design. Hold on, waiting for EagleCad to load up. You can do it. EagleCad, my computer, I replaced the fan on my computer so it should be a little faster. Let me slow it down. OK, so this is the RFM feather. And if you all remember, last week, we talked about this design. So this is a UFL connector. I'm going to put it on the TDoCU so you can see. Long one second. There's so many layers. OK, so this is the antenna using the UFL connector. UFL connectors allow quick attachment to a tiny surface mount component and then it would go to an SMA connector. And so last week on the Great Search, we talked about UFL to SMA adapters, SMA versus RP SMA. But now it's time to actually get an antenna. And I had, hold on, let me get my ginormous antenna because people like this ginormous antenna. So I've got a couple antennas. OK, so we've got this ginormous antenna here. And then I've got attached to a UFL adapter. And what I like about this antenna is it's got this tilt and swivel. So it can be sticking up or it can be tilted to the right or it can be tilted angularly, like 45 degrees. There's a little clicker there. This is an antenna that is not tilt and swivel. It's just like it goes on the top. Here's another tilt and swivel. This one is, I don't know what this is. I think this is a Wi-Fi antenna. So this is common. People get routers. You have a little Wi-Fi antenna sticking out. Again, you could have it be 45, 90 degrees or straight out. And so, yeah, this antenna, which is this enormous Laura when antenna, I thought I'd show how to find antennas because you can get any kind of antenna on Digikey. They stock thousands and thousands of different ones. So maybe show people what to look for and some of the specifications when getting antennas. So let's go to Digikey. OK, so let's look for, let's just type an antenna. Let's start with that. And then last week, remember, we did the coaxial cables or the RF accessories. The image event is the thing that we want. Well, yeah, I want a UFO or SMA or a PSMA adapter, but we want a RF antenna. So let's look for a single band and we're going to look for an antenna. OK, so active as well. So let's start with that. And then there's like so many specifications to look for, but the first thing we want to do is like, OK, we want the frequency band. So we're going to be finding an antenna that's used for Laura or packet radio in the 915 megahertz ISM band, and that's in the US. In Japan, I think it's 868, and in parts of Europe, it's 433. Very similar, but let's just do 900 megahertz for us. So there's a couple of places actually where you can do the frequency. You can do the center, the frequency group, but actually like frequency range, because I can get, you know, the 10 of the range usually like I'm generalizing a lot here because again, there's 1000, 1000 of antennas. But in general, you want kind of like a tight range around 900. So maybe like 858 to 950 megahertz. So let's go down here. OK, so a lot of options. So like I said, you know, if you're in Japan, you might want 868. Let's kind of like just pick out a bunch that go from like about 870 and are at least 915, 920, 960, 950, 925. Because it's, you know, you don't need to be too specific. You want to have like, you want to have a range of options. 915, there's a lot. And I'm just option clicking all of these. And 900, keep going, keep going, keep going. OK, and now we're actually kind of getting to the end because this is past 915. OK, so let's apply. And let's also only look for ones that are in stock right now. OK, so there's a lot of options. So there's actually some antennas that already have a UFL connector. And like these are actually pretty good. Like if it's inside of an enclosure, again, this isn't weatherproof. But inside an enclosure, this is a perfectly good antenna. So a couple of those, this is like a whip antenna. Some of these are like pretty huge, just like a metal, gigantic antenna. You're going to have high gain antennas. What we want, and some surface mount antennas, what we want is a, and this is called a whip antenna. Because you can whip it through the air, I guess. I don't know. And we want, it's like a tilt swivel whip. So go to whip and we will whip, tilt, and swivel. There are other antennas. The basic trade-offs you're going to get with antennas without going into five years of antenna education, which I don't have, is there's directionality and the matchingness of the game, of the gain. So directionality is actually called the gain of the antenna. Now, I just want to warn people, because if you're like an analog engineer, you'll be like, oh, the gain of a circuit is how much it amplifies. These antennas are not active antennas. Unless you're purchasing an active antenna, the gain isn't, like it doesn't give you more. It just means how much more directional it is. So if you're doing a project where you're trying to, you have an antenna and you're pointing it at the moon or you're pointing it at another building or you're pointing it at a warehouse or something and you want to transfer data back and forth, you want a high gain antenna, because you want to be able to reach just in that one direction. So that's high gain. If you are just trying to like radiate and get data from all over the place because you have like a mesh network or you don't know where the nodes are or you're doing like a Laura setup where your nodes could be traveling all around, you want a low gain antenna. The lowest gain is one, because it's like a unit circle. And then the matchingness of the antenna is the VSWR. And that, it's like the, something virtual standing wave ratio, I think. I don't remember the V stands for. Basically you want it as low as possible. The lower the number, and basically you're gonna get like two or less. That's normal is how efficient the antenna is at converting the electrical into RF energy. I, again, I can't get into a huge antenna tutorial right now. There's lots of good videos online on YouTube. Okay, so let's pick something with like a VSWR of two or less. Again, that's considered good. Other than that, you know, in general, and then the gain, remember the gain is how directional it is. It's not how much more power you're getting. And then we have a lot of good options. So I do like, you know, there's really long ones and there's short ones. A lot of options here actually, which is kind of good. This one's nice. I kind of want like a huge one, which would be kind of cool. So, you know, I could do by price. You can see what's going on here. This one's kind of short. This one is like this, this length. This one is so long, but this one looks good. I think this one is kind of the next one because I want like a nice big antenna because what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use this antenna to do range testing. I wanna see like how far can we go with this Laura or RFM packet radio. So, this one is my pick, the ANT916OCLG. And this is by Lynx. And like I've been using Lynx antennas since like college in there. They've always been really good. They're very reliable. And they've got excellent data sheets, which tell you like they'll give you the VSWR and they'll give you specifications. And they're very reliable. So I think this is gonna be my pick, 10 bucks. That's a great search. That's a great search. Where in the world