Irish firm Taoglas has announced Inception, a GNSS L1 and L5 low-profile patch-in-a-patch antenna.

The HP5354.A offers dual-band stacked patch performance in a standard 35 by 35 by 4mm form factor as the second antenna is recessed into the first, without stacking the parts. The passive, dual-feed surface mount design (SMD) reduces antenna height by 50%, decreases weight and saves horizontal real estate, making it suitable for GNSS applications demanding precision and accuracy with limited space.

The HP5354.A (www.taoglas.com/product/innovative-multi-band-gnss-l1-l5-low-profile-patch-antenna) is a drop-in replacement for single-band surface mount patches, improving the IoT device’s positioning accuracy from 3 to 1.5 metres without compromising the dual-band L1 and L5 performance. Designed using a custom electro-ceramics formula, Taoglas’ surface mount antenna technology ensures performance and seamless integration into devices requiring high-precision GNSS.

Applications, such as asset tracking, smart agriculture, industrial tracking, commercial drones and autonomous vehicles, require better stability, resilience and precision. For decades, the industry has used single-band GPS, but emerging bands such as L2, L5, L6 and L-band offer designers a path to cleaner signals, improved gain and cm-level accuracy. The same trend applies to global GNSS technologies, including GPS, Glonass, Galileo, Beidou, QZSS, IRNSS and SBAS.

“Taoglas has been designing and manufacturing reliable, high-performance GNSS antennas in-house for over 20 years, and we remain committed to investing in new antenna technologies,” said Dermot O’Shea, CEO at Taoglas. “We know electro-ceramic patches are still the most efficient way to receive circularly polarised signals and, before Inception, multi-band configurations required a stacked patch antenna, which adds to height and weight. The HP5354.A – our latest innovation – means you can move to dual band without changing the footprint, size and height of your current single band GPS antenna.”

It has a passive peak gain of 2.61dBi optimised for GPS L1 and L5, BeiDou B1, Galileo E1 and Glonass G1 operation for dual-band GNSS receivers.

The Taoglas HC125A (www.taoglas.com/product/hc125-a-low-profile-hybrid-coupler-for-multiband-gnss) hybrid coupler can be used to combine the dual feeds for L1 patch offering high RHCP gain and optimal axial ratio for upper constellations including GPS L1, Beidou B1, Galileo E1 and Glonass G1.

Active circuitry needs to be upgraded to L1 and L5 along with the antenna. The firm’s TFM.100B (www.taoglas.com/product/smt-gnss-front-end-module-l1l5) L1 and L5 front-end module can be designed onto the device PCB alongside the antenna to reclaim real estate and save designers up to two years of complex design.