915Mhz Whip Antenna for LoRa and Meshtastic 17cm, Black

It’s a great little device with awesome battery life! I’d recommend swapping the antenna, the stock one is kinda meh. Everyone seems to recommend the Muzi Works whip, that’s what I upgraded to and it’s a night and day difference. The only thing is that you will also need to swap the pigtail from a male SMA to female. Here are some links to the US Amazon store, but it should help point you in the right direction: Antenna: https://a.co/d/059es3yEPigtail: https://a.co/d/00a6fmfl Bonus stuff: If you’re into 3D printing there are some great cases available that give room for a larger battery. Here’s what mine looks like now.

https://a.co/d/0fI5LAqI I ordered the muzi works one. Hopefully just as good?

So - I finally got a tinySA and was able to make some readings of the antenna at different angles - and realized my coils were too spaced out. It created too many side lobes and not enough punch at the horizon. (See the plot in blue). I redesigned my coils (again), and I think we have a winner. Tighter pitch between coils, and around a 3/8" form seems to get rid of those lobes and more push to the horizon. (See plot in green). This shows how it compares to the Muzi 1/2-wave 915mhz antenna, (yellow dashed line). Notice how the green line has more than +3db at the horizon for the 2-element version compared to the Muzi. I'm going to work on a 3-element version with the new coils and see if I can get even more gain and a narrower beam width.

For what it's worth, a better antenna is a pretty good bang for your buck in terms of increasing Tx/Rx. Something like this can be had for cheap and really does help. I have this one, as well as the stubbies, and I popped them on my NanoVNA to test the resonant frequency. My stubby was like 30 MHz off from 915, whereas the Muzi antenna was pretty much right on the money. That plus sticking it in my window helped a lot.