Bandwidth or lack of, is one of the biggest hurdles to mobile blogging - especially as faster networks and multimedia capable phones keep coming online. Fractus, the Spanish based aerial components firm has created a new 3D based antenna which greatly enhances a phones signal optimization. Called BandXpand the technology is available to providers and designers today.

Reported ElectronicsWeekly's Steve Bush:

“In conjunction with the antenna and PCB, it boosts performance and improves bandwidth,” Fractus’ chief technology officer Dr Carles Puente told Electronics Weekly. “It is a shaped metallic piece on the PCB that hosts the RF and the antenna.”

Getting the best from an antenna, according to Puente, means making use of any space left in the phone. “Each phone has a new engineering effort every time,” he said. “At the end it is how to extract the maximum performance from a very small space.”

Fractus is calling its new technique BandXpand. “For every set of frequency bands there would usually be an optimal ground. The [radio] device does not usually have an optimal ground,” said Puente.

“BandXpand makes best use of the ground that is there. It can be stamped metal, injection moulded or a thin film. It is usually an element that looks like an antenna, but it is not an antenna,” he said.

An antenna designer could, for example, said Fractus, develop a single quadband antenna with GSM 900/1800 and CDMA 800/1900 capabilities without the need for a switchplexer, and a separate UMTS antenna, isolated from the quadband antenna by 12dB - “producing a device that could handle two way voice calls anywhere in the world at the same time as downloading a multimedia file”.

Also see Fractus.com for more info.

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