Argon with Wifi and Mesh Antenna, Connect 2 Antennas

Troubleshooting
1

Has anyone had any success activating the Mesh Antenna on the Argon. I found it hurt performance. My solution was to put an antenna activated Xenon near the Argon. Worked great.

Since the Antenna is needed on the Argon for the Wifi signal I suspect it can’t be used for both signals.

Found this about it Argon and Antenna(s)

Looks like that is not a possibility so don’t activate the mesh Antenna unless your Argon is not using wifi.

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2

I know the antennas are omni-directional but you might want to try positioning the WiFi and Mesh antennas orthogonal to each other. In the picture, choose any 2 positions. Red and Green. Or Red and Blue. Or Green and Blue…

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@ninjatill. That brings up a really good point. The Argon has 2 antenna connectors. I was just activating the Mesh antenna, I did not actually connect two antennas.

The coding is here:

The important code I have pasted below:

void selectExternalMeshAntenna() {

#if (PLATFORM_ID == PLATFORM_ARGON)
	digitalWrite(ANTSW1, 1);  
	digitalWrite(ANTSW2, 0);   
#elif (PLATFORM_ID == PLATFORM_BORON)
	digitalWrite(ANTSW1, 0);
#else
	digitalWrite(ANTSW1, 0);  
	digitalWrite(ANTSW2, 1); 
#endif
}

What was here has been deleted after @ninjatill and @rickkas7 explanation.

4

The Argon actually has 3 antenna connectors; two on top ("BT" for mesh and WiFi) and one on the underside (under the micro-USB connector) for NFC. The Xenons have 2 antenna connectors; one for "BT" (mesh) and one on the underside for NFC as well. I don't have a Boron in front of me but it probably has 3 as well.

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5

The ANTSW lines don’t work quite like that. The ANTSW lines connects to the SKY13351 RF switch and only switches between the trace (or chip, depending on the device) antenna and the u.FL for mesh.

The thing about the SKY13351 is that it has two inputs (VCTL1 and VCTL2) and the one that’s low is the connected one. That’s why there are two ANTSW lines.

For reasons that are not obvious to me, the lines are swapped on the Xenon vs. Argon.

The Boron only has one line because there weren’t enough GPIO, so there’s a hardware inverter to drive the other VCTL line.

The Argon doesn’t have any antenna switch for Wi-Fi the u.FL is hardwired directly into the ESP32.

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6

Thanks you @ninjatill and @rickkas7. 2 antennas connected on my Argon and ready to test.

Got 230 m with an Antenna connected Xenon and both Antenna on the argon.

Mesh Hello World software updated to allow 2 antenna on the Argon. recent results shown as well

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