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The selection of the correct printed circuit board material is very important when you want to develop a radio. FR-4 Material is OK at 2.45GHz only if your radio can handle significant drift over temperature.

You need to look at the environment and the intended application before you select the battery technology. The reason why Lithium -Ion batteries were developed was to solve a very specific problem with Cellular phones. Radios require a good source of power for the intended application.

Connecting many buildings wirelessly….Wifi was specifically designed for this application.

If you want longer range consider lowering the frequency, band width, data rate and increase the antenna gain, receiver sensitivity and output power.

When you are first looking at developing a radio for consumer use the first thing you need to do is contact the agency that regulates the spectrum in the area you wish to sell you product.

Using multiply tranmitters on a radio system causes the receiver to have problems. It only receives a signal from one tranmitter. Why is that?

RSSI – USed as a sensor- Maybe not a good idea. RSSI is affected by interferance.

I am afraid you might be biting off more than you can chew.

Developing a product, producing and selling a product are what entrepreneur dream of….and requires a fair amount of understanding in finance, marketing, engineering and human resources.

Are radio modules a good or bad thing for RF engineers?

Is designing a radio today as easy as plopping down an RF module onto a board and expecting it to work, assume it will pass FCC testing? Or do we still need to consider RF testing, communication theory, conditions that promote unintentional radiation?

I’ve heard of Dash-7 and Ipv6/6LoWPAN, but neither seems to have much penetration … yet, and I’m not clear how the capabilities compare to the proprietary or “large” offerings?

I am trying to construct a server whereby it can be able to receive information and detect the location of a particular wireless signal.

I have a product which is worn on the hand of a person. It is suppose to be able to detect the pulse rate of the particular person and if this pulse rate exceed the “critical pulse rate” set in the program, it will transmit a signal through wireless to the server. The server would then tell the location at which this signal is send from and show the information of the person.

I am developing a project where we need to track mining equipment in underground mine shafts. The problem is GPS obviously doesn’t work underground so our solution is to use small stationary transmitters embedded in the walls of the shafts and with each trackable piece of equipment carrying a receiver we record the time and ID of a transmitter.

Pinter Electronics Consultants (PinterEC) has become the wireless and radio expert on Element 14.

Is FCC compliance/certification for 2.4GHz always required?

We have a need to limit travel on a rope being retrieved onto a drum through a pulley. We need to mount a passive non powered sensor or tag of some type onto the rope and be able to detect it within a range of 1 mtr.

We have enquired about RFID but these are typically a computer controlled solution, all we want is a “yes the tag is in range” signal to a PLC to stop the motor on the winch.

My Wifi signal seems to be intermittent in certain areas of my house, so I am seeking an alternative.

I like Zigbee due to its mesh network topology. I assume it would work well for high noise areas, which is the most critical for me. Anyone work with Zigbee for factories or other high interference locations?

For the record, I am connecting all devices ultimately to a 20mbps Internet connection from RCN.

Has running a CNC machine wirelessly every been successfully achieved with a similar error rate that wired machines experience? In other words, wireless with no error in an industrial environment. And I am referring to the connection between the actual CNC equipment and the PCs that drive them.

I have seen this attempted with dismal results. And following the failure, a football field’s length of Ethernet cable was strung to the ceiling. But with Zigbee, Wireless-N, and others, there has to be a decent solution by now?