u-blox ANT-B10 antenna board

Designed for integration into commercial end products, u-blox’s ANT-B10 antenna board is said to enable low-power, high-precision indoor positioning and to speed up evaluation, testing and commercialisation of Bluetooth direction finding and indoor positioning solutions.

The self-contained Bluetooth Low Energy antenna board, which features an antenna array comprising eight individual patch antennas, is built around a u-blox NINA-B411 Bluetooth 5.1 module. After processing incoming RF signals emitted by mobile tracker tags in the module’s radio and angle calculation processor, the solution outputs the calculated angle of arrival (AoA) without requiring any additional processes.

To determine the AoA of incoming signals for direction finding, the board concurrently processes them on all eight patch antennas. Because implementing multiple RF paths connected to multiple RF switches unnecessarily increases power demand and introduces errors, the board uses a single RF switch component from u-blox partner CoreHW that cycles through the eight antennas at a microsecond timescale.

Common use cases for Bluetooth indoor positioning and direction include tracking assets in industrial settings such as in warehouses as well as people and things in hospitals, retail environments or museums. Additionally, access control systems deployed in connected buildings can use angle detection to determine which side of a door users are located on.