I'm Not Special, and You Can Too A journey in RF Antenna Design for Dummies

The speaker, a maker with no formal security or RF background, starts with a problem: an NFC implant that a new Pixel phone could barely read. Borrowing antenna coils from spare access fobs and soldering a small capacitor onto each one raised the read range, and the talk explains the LC tank idea behind that fix in plain terms.

The middle of the talk covers the move to designing antennas as PCB traces in KiCad. The speaker describes a spacing rule of twice the trace width, tuning with a cheap VNA, and building a homemade H probe from magnet wire and a cut SMA cable to measure resonance. Trimmer capacitors let him hit the 13.56 MHz target. Stacked copper circles that act as capacitors inside the board replaced discrete parts, though the speaker reports that fabrication batches and humidity at the board house caused repeated failures and a costly reorder.

The takeaway is practical: free tools and YouTube tutorials are enough to start, measurement with a VNA is essential, and failed boards are part of the learning curve. The speaker stresses that an open, ego-free community was what kept the project going, and points to public documentation of the full design history.