POYNTING, a company specialising is antenna design and manufacturing in South Africa, has seen many sub-standard antennas being sold to the public. The public is enticed by the appealingly similar or better specifications when compared to the reputable brands, but at much lower prices.

Dr. Fourie, who is the chief innovations officer and chairman at POYNTING Group reports that they have tested some of these antennas and can confirm that their performance is nowhere close to their specifications: “… these specifications are not only misleading, but they are terrible.”

Tests performed by POYNTING showed that antenna specifications of many copycat antennas are highly over stated and often have horrendous radiation patterns with severe Voltage Standing Wave Ratio (VSWR) issues and antenna gain figures being exaggerated.

The antenna is an intricate part of the whole solution, where this seemingly simple device can easily negate the performance of the equipment that it is connected to.

“We often see expensive router & gateway equipment being installed only to find out that the whole system’s performance was compromised by using substandard antennas to save a few Euros”, said Dr. Fourie,

“You purchase that antenna and wonder why your system is not performing as expected. It is difficult for the end customer to determine if it is the antenna or is the problem with the connected equipment e.g. LTE/WiFi router, M2M gateway, etc.”.