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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I'm using the 2 W for a project and one thing I would love is for a better wifi antenna, the one that's on the 2 just isn't good enough. You can hack it though, there is a spot on the board where you can solder on a connector, cut a single trace and you're good to go. But it would be great if it would do better out of the box.

Amazingly powerful hardware for the price these little things.

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I wouldn't hold out hope for an easier out of the box wifi antenna. If you want a U.FL antenna for the built-in wifi, there has to be a physical switch (cost, fragility) or a built-in antenna connected to U.FL you can replace (same issues) or the same cut and solder pattern for wifi antennas across chips like ESPs, nRFs, and others.

Just use a USB adapter with a decent antenna.

There are RF connectors by Hirose which are bypassable due to a built-in switch, but I don't think pigtails with them are common.

> there has to be a physical switch

Or literally any $1-3 SPDT RF switch? >80% of which are directly optimized and advertised for wifi and bluetooth?

For a Zero, that’s a big BoM item given this would be used by relatively few people.

Yeah, western parts are expensive.

https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C47117600.html

Here's a capable switch for $0.07.

You can also have infernal multiplexers to route the antenna signal to another pin, like the esp32-S3 has: https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/latest/esp32s...

The output trace needs to be impedance-controlled, but it could be a regular GPIO, or an external antenna connector/footprint.

The 'infernal' really threw me until I realized you must have meant 'internal'.

Ah, sorry, my Android keyboard isn't that reliable, I tend to make a lot of typos when I type on my phone.

Yeah I find the Pi's of that era have pretty poor wifi reception, has been a constant source of uncertainty when I run things on them sadly

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