HNTenna – Helium miners in the US and Europe have had the HNTenna available for a while. We just got it to Australia and are now selling it at RFShop: https://rfshop.com.au/product/902-928mhz-white-outdoor-helium-antenna/ We have made a handy kit on our website, where you can buy the antenna and any extra cables you may need. If the options are not listed there you can always send us a message or give us a call, happy to help! In this video we give an overview of the specifics of the (new to Australia) #HNTenna. Why it works well for all IoT applications, even with a low gain. We love that it is multipolarized.

Video transcript:

The new, well for us in Australia I guess, Helium HNTenna. I don’t know if I can say I keep it simple, keep it real, but this is just keeping it real. There’s another antenna in stock with RFShop. So, I just quickly wanted to run you through this – tell everybody in the Helium or IoT space 915 megahertz band: there’s another antenna that you can now buy from RFShop here in Australia. It’s the HNTenna from MP Antennas. Now of course HNTntenna is heavily focused around the Helium Network, which is great and that’s currently the toggle to town, so to speak. But it’s not just for Helium it’s for any IoT application. Anything that’s 902 to 928 megahertz. Now on their website MP Antennas basically say it’s US only US/Canada only but that actually is because it’s in the US market is being marketed in the US as a product. But for Australia AU915 it is a excellent antenna and it works really well. It’s also an antenna that works really well in the AS923 band, which is also in within that range of capabilities of this antenna. So, if you use AS923 if you use AU915 if you use US915, they all are 100 percent relevant for this model that we sell here in Australia. They do have a model for the European band as well but because of our Australian need is for the AU915 or the US915 designed antennas that’s what we’re going to look at here.

Now it’s not an unboxing video first of all it’s in the bag and I hate unboxing videos because it’s just kind of pointless. I just want to go through the features that are specific to this antenna so let me just get it out of the bag. I’m unbagging for what it’s worth. You of course get the antenna itself I’m now using this on my setup here in the workshop just because i really want to run through the paces and see what it’s like. I do like it it comes with a right angle bracket basically that antenna and then the youngster clamps. So what you get just to put this out of the way use the antenna by itself you can see it’s actually not a not a huge thing. Ben from MP Antennas have opened it on camera in an interview with Nick from Gristle King, so you could see that it’s kind of a bike gun type structure in there. Nice and compact, definitely waterproof, as you could see the um from the top down. There’s no way that the water can get in.

So, it’s a 3 db gain antenna. Now this is a almost a difficult one for me to talk through because low gain doesn’t get as much attention and love as the high gain antennas in a lot of these communities. I do like low gain antennas a lot and I like a classic antenna with a classic design such as this one a lot. The reason for that is that you get what you get you know the radiation pattern is quite clean it’s quite predictable and it’s quite reliable. I for one get good range out of this antenna and the other thing that’s some bit of an opinion here but but it is a fact that with the narrow band application with IoT you really work on narrowband applications so your receivers, your miners on the other side of the scale they actually are extremely sensitive. So, when people are saying oh I need to get 10 kilometers, I need to get 20 kilometers – this type of antenna can hands down do that because of the signal strength. By the time it hits the receiver is still well above what the capabilities is of those helium hotspots or your typical IoT gateway. So 3db to me is a very handy number to use. So, I would not dismiss this antenna in well first of all in city applications.

I’ll get to that now, or even in more rural applications. Such as we are here in Lonsdale – the South of Adelaide it’s kind of suburbia and it gets a little bit, you know, not rural yet but it’s certainly on the outskirts. That’s the bracket that comes with it. One important thing to note just as I have it upside down is: it actually comes with an N-female connector. Now, in the Helium community that might look like a challenge. As an antenna company an antenna engineer this is to me normal, because the vast majority of the antennas that we sell before we got into the Helium market was with N connector so this is what you would mount connect to and then you would have an N-connector coming out new with a cable that is an N-male. Why this is important for us and for anybody that sells cables is this antenna needs to get an N-male connector on the cable such as this one here. So there’s an N-male connector which is different to what you would see if you just have this blanket Alibaba or Ebay in any of those those cable types you’ll see they always have N-female, because the antennas that you would get in the mainstream IoT up not iot helium stuff seems to be N-male. That’s just something to be aware of. It actually has no impact on the antenna performance itself, in fact this is to me normal. From all the other antennas that we deal with.

What else is there: they sell it as a multi-polarized antenna. I don’t know I don’t really want to try the american pronunciation for for the multi-polarization, it is something that gets sold as a useful artifact in cities and where you have a lot of reflections coming from buildings or buildings or structures or trees or even hills and so forth. I agree it is useful in the city it is useful in places where you get a lot of reflections. If I think just blankly and clinically about what’s happening in the IoT network and I have this this thing that I mentioned earlier this is my little IoT sensor that we use. That is a small little antenna a really small extremely small four developments it needs it’s operating in. If you say multi-polarized it means that the antenna is in principle capable of receiving any polarization that comes into it. Now in the Helium crypto and earning more rewards and so forth you actually want me to talk to another gateway to talk to another gateway or helium miner and get a better connection. But the reality in the IoT network we don’t know what the orientation of these devices are going to be, because somebody might put it against the wall someone might put it on the ceiling, somebody might have it where it just keeps moving as you go around. So the polarization of your devices is kind of really undefined it’s just all over the place, so having a multi-polarized antenna in your gateway and putting that to communicate with the IoT devices is a gain. I’m used to it it actually makes just perfect sense and if you would think yeah but can’t we control this? Just think about your cell phone you place it anywhere, you place it in your orientation and you might just get it to work any different way. So, to me multi-polarization multi-polarization whatever is really sensible, not just for a helium network set up. In a city where there’s a lot of polar reflections, but just in general for the IoT application. We’re looking at that – it’s on our website rfshop.com.au. If you have any questions and what cable requirements you have we do custom cable links for you for this this antenna. For any of the other antennas that we have on our website or just your application as well. Please remember to subscribe to our channel. If you have any comments let us know underneath. We’ll try to address them as soon as we can.