Any way to add antenna for the bluetooth in X201 Tablet?

X200, X201, X220 (including equivalent tablet models) and X300, X301 series specific matters only.
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houndkr
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Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:21 pm
Location: Seoul, Korea

Any way to add antenna for the bluetooth in X201 Tablet?

#1 Post by houndkr » Sat Oct 13, 2012 2:14 am

I am using bluetooth mouse lately, and I noticed that bluetooth gets rather choppy at the right side of the machine, where mouse is supposed to be used at. I think it's because that bluetooth daughter card is located at front-middle of the machine, and the chassis itself is somewhat blocking the bluetooth radio.
I thought about adding an antenna and routing it to the right side of the machine, or into the LCD bezel, but from what I see, there is no way I can add any antenna: no connector, no antenna itself in the machine(maybe I just couldn't find it)
Is it possible to add an antenna to the bluetooth daughter card? I can do simple wireworks and lead soldering.

mikemex
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Re: Any way to add antenna for the bluetooth in X201 Tablet?

#2 Post by mikemex » Wed Oct 24, 2012 2:29 pm

Yes, Bluetooth was designed so it has the antenna is in the module itself, so there is really nothing you can do about it. If talking about possibilities yes, you can route a derivate antenna but I'd not waste my time on it if I were you.

Simplest solution I can think of is to put the mouse over a thick book, taller than the notebook itself...

However, the problem you're eperiencing seems weird. Are you sure you get better results in other positions? Maybe it's just Bluetooth's latency.
Main: i5 3550, 16GB, Z68 Pro3 M, 64GB SLC, 320GB HD, GTX 650Ti, 21.5 FHD LED
T420: i5-2520m, 8GB, SSD: 64GB SLC (boot) | 128GB MLC (storage), HD3000, HD (1366x768), 6 Cell, BT, WebCam
X220: i5-2520m, 4GB, SSD: 64GB SLC (boot) | 128GB MLC (storage), HD3000, HD (1366x768), 6 Cell, BT, WebCam, FP

houndkr
Posts: 31
Joined: Tue Dec 20, 2011 2:21 pm
Location: Seoul, Korea

Re: Any way to add antenna for the bluetooth in X201 Tablet?

#3 Post by houndkr » Thu Oct 25, 2012 7:45 am

It IS wierd, right? :)

Well, shortly after I posted the original post here, I just managed to take a leap of faith and soldered a wire antenna on the bluetooth module, where I thought it seemed to be the place for the antenna(the place that's labeled "a1").
Hopefully as a result of soldering I did get a noticeable improvement in my mouse performance, but I don't really think this is enough. In the end I ended up ordering a BT3.0 module from ebay, and I now am waiting for the package to arrive.

I think the laggy BT movement is caused by the radiowave blocking caused by magnesium case ThinkPads are using, or at least it has something to do with the radio signals, as I seem to have some "sweet spots" where mouse really works fine when used within the area. I thought about pulling out the antenna to the modem port hole on the right side of the machine, which will hopefully elliminate the effects caused by magnesium casing, but I thought I'd rather do it once the new BT 3.0 module fails...

Updates coming soon.

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