Improving NFC Patch Kit sensitivity?

[SolomonParticipant]

Hey there,

I’ve received my order today (great product by the way), including a patch kit and extra antenna.

Patch kit works great, extends like a dream, however the extra antenna seems pretty useless – nothing to connect it to.

I added it to the order off the back of your video where you set up three antennas off the same patch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3BbIDk8opk). Looking at the video now the kit seems a bit different, but I assumed the idea of the extra antenna is still the same?

We’re working with some flimsy cards running NFC-B, sensitivity is a pretty major issue we’re trying to overcome. Samsung phones seem to work a lot better than the nexus tablets we were hoping to use in production – had my fingers crossed that this would get us back on track.

Any thoughts/comments/solutions would be much appreciated!

Thanks, Som.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Solomon, the NFC Patch Kit can indeed support 3 antennas connected at the same time but rigging it requires hacking up the connectors. We sell antennas individually as well as in a kit because you can affix a them to more than one setup and interchange the Android device between them.

RE: Improving tag read times from a poor quality tag can be achieved with tuning the NFC patch antenna better couple to these tags. This will require a custom antenna design though. In quantities of 50 units we charge roughly $6000 or $120/ea. More details here.

hope that helps,
Richard

[SolomonParticipant]

Hi Richard, thanks for the quick response.

The tuning seems interesting, that said we’re only looking for a single working unit for a prototype, $6k is a bit out of the price range.

Annoying as the tag is a standard credit card job, you’d think most antennas would be roughly the right size.

Do you sell any other size antennas that might do the job? Don’t need any guarantees, just looking for a workable solution. I’ve jimmied together an image of the card in question:

Thanks again, Som.

[RichardKeymaster]

Hi Solomon, we don’t currently sell other antenna sizes for the NFC Patch Kit. However, the best matching size for standard credit card sized tags is the 56mm x 64mm antenna we currently offer. If it’s not reading well then the card quality is very low or it’s been damaged in some way (bends and crimps can do this). You can ship us a sample of your target tags and we can do a full assessment to see what options you have. The best quality ISO7810 (credit card size) tags are from HID and SecuraKey in case you want to try them out.

BTW, I’m moving this post to the main Forum and changing it’s title as it’s a common question that comes up about the NFC Patch Kit. I hope you don’t mind.

Richard

[SolomonParticipant]

Thanks Richard, really appreciate the advice.

Swapping the cards out at this stage isn’t an option .. they’re currently in the wild with a fairly large customer base.

We actually thought it was a software issue, in that NDEF and NFC-A are prioritised over NFC-B by most readers .. however having put together a custom app that only looks for NFC-B the issue persists.

Anyway, we’ll definitely keep a tag assessment in mind.

Cheers, Som.

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