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u-blox launches compact triple-band antenna for high-precision GNSS

Thu, Sep 25, 2025

u-blox has announced the launch of the ANN-MB3, its latest L1/L2/L5 triple-band RTK antenna. Designed for the u-blox F20 high precision platform the ANN-MB3 delivers exceptional performance at an affordable price point. By offering a robust antenna suitable for mass adoption, u-blox is addressing the industry’s growing demand for a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective GNSS antenna solution that accelerates the adoption of high-precision positioning technologies across industrial, automotive, and robotics applications.

The ANN-MB3 provides customers with a practical and scalable way to integrate high-precision positioning into their products. By combining robust design and compact dimensions (62 × 80 × 25.5 mm), the antenna makes high-precision GNSS accessible for a wide range of industries and applications.

The ANN-MB3 integrates an additional notch filter (LTE B13) in L1 RF path, and provides out-of-band interference mitigation, ensuring reliable performance even in harsh RF environments while minimising design complexity for customers. Ready-to-use and designed with flexible installation options, ANN-MB3 reduces the time, cost, and RF expertise required to implement triple-band GNSS solutions.

Optimised for the u-blox F20 triple-band platform (e.g. ZED-F20P) and fully compatible with u-blox F9 receivers supporting L1, L2, and L5 bands, ANN-MB3 enables customers to standardise on a single antenna solution that covers multiple frequency needs.

Applications such as industrial automation, agriculture, heavy machinery, autonomous vehicles, mobile robotics, UAVs, and network infrastructure increasingly require robust centimetre-level positioning.

https://www.u-blox.com

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Taoglas expands Comet antenna series with compact solutions for metal enclosures

Tue, Sep 23, 2025

Taoglas has announced the expansion of its Comet Series with the new MA58x family of compact, discrete, screw- or through-hole mount puck antennas. Metal structures or flat surfaces, such as cabinets, can affect antenna performance and change the electrical groundplane. The Comet MA58x Series is specifically engineered to maintain stable, high-efficiency operation in these challenging conditions.

Conventional LTE antennas rely on their RF cable to achieve low-band efficiency, particularly when the cable itself is routed inside a metal enclosure, turning it into an unintended radiator. The MA58x design removes this dependency, enabling efficient radiation and delivering at least 20% better performance than comparable alternatives.

With a footprint of just 101 x 101mm and super low profile of just 20mm, the antennas deliver reliable multi-antenna connectivity across 5G/4G MIMO, Wi-Fi 6/7, and GNSS constellations including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou. Advanced RF design enables consistent gain and efficiency across global cellular frequencies from 600 MHz to 6 GHz and Wi-Fi bands up to 7.125 GHz, while also supporting legacy 2.4/5.8 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for maximum compatibility.

The rugged, weather-resistant housing is moulded in Acrylonitrile Styrene Acrylate (ASA) for long-term outdoor durability, and the IP67-rated enclosure with a screw/stud mount provides a permanent installation option that ensures secure, reliable operation in vibration-prone and harsh conditions such as fleet vehicles, heavy equipment, and industrial automation.

“Metal housings are often unavoidable in real-world deployments, and they can present serious challenges for RF performance,” said Baha Badran, Head of Engineering, Taoglas. “With the Comet MA58x Series, we’ve addressed that head-on, while also delivering the efficiency, reliability, and multi-antenna performance that are normally very difficult to achieve in such a compact form factor. This combination gives our customers confidence that their systems will stay connected, whatever the environment.”

The new antennas are available now in multiple configurations and in either black or white enclosures. Custom cable lengths and connector options are also offered, making integration more flexible for OEMs and system designers. The MA58x Series is ideally suited to gateways and routers, public safety systems, point-of-sale terminals, digital signage, smart home automation, robotics, and industrial automation. The Comet Series also offers a magnetic mount MA32x variant to address different deployment needs.

www.taoglas.com

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Sfera Labs Introduces SuperCaps UPS Expansion Board for Strato Pi Max

Tue, Sep 23, 2025

Sfera Labs has released the new SuperCaps UPS X2-Series Expansion Board, bringing integrated, supercapacitor-based backup power to its Strato Pi Max XL and XS servers.

The Strato Pi Max is based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or 5, with a wide range of swappable expansion boards that adapt it to countless applications. With the addition of the SuperCaps UPS, the platform now gains built-in protection against power interruptions, ensuring continuous operation and safeguarding critical data.

The SuperCaps UPS expansion board integrates with the Strato Pi Max ecosystem and is particularly valuable in environments where short power outages are common, such as industrial automation systems, building management controllers, smart grids, and edge computing nodes, where even brief interruptions can cause downtime, loss of sensor data, or interrupted communication with the cloud. The expansion board also enables sending alerts when a power outage occurs, allowing remote monitoring systems to react quickly and prevent wider disruption. In applications like industrial databases or logging systems, the ability to perform a clean shutdown ensures data integrity and prevents corruption of critical files.

Unlike the existing UPS expansion board for Strato Pi Max, which requires an external lead-acid or AGM battery, the new SuperCaps UPS uses high-capacity supercapacitors directly integrated on the board. This results in a more compact, durable, and installation-friendly solution, eliminating the need for external cabling, bulky batteries, or periodic battery replacement.

With this launch, Sfera Labs further extends the flexibility of the Strato Pi Max ecosystem, giving engineers and system integrators a reliable tool for deploying resilient industrial, IoT, and edge computing solutions in the most demanding environments.

sferalabs.cc

 

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Morse Micro announces mass production of Wi-Fi HaLow SoC, modules, evaluation kit and HaLowLink 2

Tue, Sep 23, 2025

Morse Micro has announced the mass production and general availability of its second-generation MM8108 System-on-Chip (SoC). This milestone represents a major leap-forward for Wi-Fi HaLow, bringing data throughput at range, which will enable the next generation of IoT and Edge AI solutions.

The MM8108 Wi-Fi HaLow SoC, which delivers long-range Wi-Fi at speeds up to 43Mbps, is now in full-scale production. This milestone paves the way for a new generation of long-range, low-power IoT devices. Complementing the SoC’s rollout, Morse Micro has made available a series of its Evaluation Kits (EVKs):
● MM8108-EKH01, integrating Morse Micro’s MM8108 SoC with Broadcom’s BCM2711 SoC on a Linux-based Raspberry Pi 4 platform
● MM8108-EKH05, integrating Morse Micro’s MM8108 SoC with ST Microelectronics’s STM32U585 on a FreeRTOS-based IoT platform
● MM8108-EKH19, integrating Morse Micro’s MM8108 SoC on a USB-A dongle with GLi.net’s GL-MT3000 router with MediaTek’s MT7981B Wi-Fi 6 SoC

With the MM8108 entering mass production, module availability is rapidly expanding to meet growing customer demand. Morse Micro’s MM8108-MF15457 reference module is now available to the general public on Mouser.com, while AzureWave’s AW-HM677 module is available for high volume customers directly from AzureWave.

MOB-AH-8108 module is already available to support low- to mid-volume customer requirements, with full mass production scheduled for later this year. Similarly, Quectel’s modules are also scheduled for mass production later this year. This breadth of options ensures developers and OEMs have multiple pathways to integrate Wi-Fi HaLow and bring products to market faster.

As part of this announcement, Morse Micro also unveiled its next-generation evaluation platform, HaLowLink 2. Building its HaLowLink 1, the new platform upgrades the core Wi-Fi HaLow SoC from MM6108 to the MM8108, delivering 43Mbps throughput at extended range thanks to 256QAM modulation rate and 26dBm internal PA on MM8108.

Designed to make Wi-Fi HaLow adoption faster and easier, HaLowLink 2 provides a powerful reference design that simplifies evaluation, prototyping, and deployment of Wi-Fi HaLow networks.

www.morsemicro.com

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