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I am working on a project where I need to place some external antennas in an plane of around 220mm to 400mm in size.

The wireless technologies in use are WiFi 2.4/5Ghz, Bluetooth, 4G LTE, 5G NR, LoRaWAN 865 to 868MHz. We plan to use 2 antennas for WiFi-Bluetooth, 3 or 4 for Cellular (Main, Diversity, GNSS, 2x MIMO Antennas Frequency Range of cellular from 700MHz to 5GHz) and 1 antenna for LoRaWAN.

I am no RF Engineer, but I want to decide the placement of these antennas. Requirements are that the interference and coupling between antennas is minimal and these antennas perform optimally within the constraints.

Apart from the general guidelines for antennas placement such as placing the antennas at least 1/4th wavelength apart, orienting the antennas in a way that that the radiation patterns of antennas are different from each other what are the other ways to ensure optimal performance?

I would really appreciate if someone can point me to resources that will help me come up with a solution for this. Also, learnt that some antennas placement simulation software can help decide antenna placement.

What different approaches can I try to solve this?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ This is a complicated RF/microwave problem. Rules of thumb are not going to work. You should look into some of the work Apple (and other cell phone makers) did to package multiple antennas for different frequencies in a 3" x 8" package. \$\endgroup\$
    – SteveSh
    Commented Mar 28, 2022 at 19:39

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I am no RF Engineer, but I want to decide the placement of these antennas.

Then I suggest you hire an RF engineer, since it won't be easy to get all these radio systems to work together without any problems - especially the unfortunate GNSS system, that is trying to decode a very weak satellite signal, with so many transmitters in close proximity.

Presumably this is not a commercial product, since getting so many co-located transmitters through the approval process would be really difficult.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Or perhaps you would like to hire the team of engineers who designed the RF layout for Apple's iPhones, iPads, etc. This is not a simple task at all, and would require extensive testing facilities to verify your design. \$\endgroup\$
    – Phil Freedenberg
    Commented Mar 28, 2022 at 21:44

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