Where are the antennas situated?

[Pyramancer]

I'm wondering where in the Pyra the antennas will be located.

With send and recieve antennas for WiFi, send and receive antennas for Bluetooth, send and receive antennas for cellular, and a receive antenna for GPS -- between four and seven antennas, plus also a sensor for the compass -- it seems that there ought to be a lot of cables going from the mainboard to antennae/sensors in the periphery of the device (presumably in the top corners of the lid?). I don't really see many wires/cables in the pictures I've seen so far, so curiosity has gotten the better of me!

 

[slaeshjag]

the cellular antenna is the big boxy thing at the edge of the mainboard by the SD card slots.

 

[levi]

Unlike the pandora, the wifi antenna is on the main/peripheral board, not threaded through the hinge, to simplify assembly (the same reason why we don't have lights on the hinge fed by fiddly light pipes that can be accidentally swapped or put in back to front easily). Now there's just the one display cable going through the hinge.

I've a vague recollection that the wifi will use the same antenna as the cellular service/4G (a blue rectangular box near to the bottom left corner as viewed from the underside). I said that recently on here, but I don't recall where I got that information from on further consideration. I guess we won't really know until we see a build not including the 4G/GPS chip. It's quite a large antenna so it could conceivably give us some MIMO coverage to reduce signal blackouts (but it may suffer brownouts depending on how you hold it). There were some analytics done recently on signal strength though, so I'm hopeful it will be pretty bulletproof. BT I assume uses some embedded antenna on some chip somewhere, like the Pandora did.

 

[Pocak]

The 4G antenna module is hard to miss — as mentioned above — it's the blue box at the bottom of the picture. It has everything the cellular chip needs, including GNSS.

WiFi needs two antennas — one for 2.4Ghz, one for 5Ghz. The former doubles as the Bluetooth antenna. As for location, i think it's the two small white boxes on the right side of the picture, at the edge of the PCB. I'm not 100% sure, but the location and size seem right (datasheet says they're 3.2mm × 1.6mm × 1.3mm).

The magnetometer doesn't need an external antenna. I don't know where the chip is, but when hns released the schematics for the Pyra, he said there will be more, so, surely, he will release the layout later. No chip can hide from you then.

Since the antennas are on the same PCB as the respective radios, no cables are needed.

 

[Pyramancer]

Thank you slaeshjag, levi, pocak for the progressively more detailed responses. (Each provided something to think about before the next was posted.)

WiFi needs two antennas — one for 2.4Ghz, one for 5Ghz. The former doubles as the Bluetooth antenna. As for location, i think it's the two small white boxes on the right side of the picture, at the edge of the PCB. I'm not 100% sure, but the location and size seem right (datasheet says they're 3.2mm × 1.6mm × 1.3mm).

Can that be right? That's _really_ short. One would think that a quarter wavelength antenna at 2.4 GHz would be about 3 cm long. Amazing that they can make things work with something that small!

 

[levi]

It surprised me too, but then the 150Mbps wifi dongle that I bought alongside my original Pandora order surprised me too by basically being as small as a wireless mouse dongle or something - about as small as its practical to be and still be pretty easy to remove from a USB port. Certainly, it's smaller than 3cm in any dimension.

 

[spud42]

that is only if the antenna is kept in a straight line.