Antennas

For mobile and ENG applications, choice of antenna can make the difference between a successful transmission and a complete disaster.  Giga-Com therefore produces a complete range of antennas to help you get the best performance from your microwave link and our engineers are ready to make recommendations on where and how to use them.

Where a standard product doesn’t exactly meet your requirement we are also able to quickly produce custom designs such as highly ruggedized versions of our commercial products for COTS semi military requirements or discreet packaging for covert requirements.

Typically, most applications are covered by products from one of the following categories:-

Patch and Cone Antennas
Patch and Cone antennas are very effective in the lower frequency bands, say 1.5GHz to 5.0GHz.  Their wide beam width and very compact construction makes them ideal for ground to air and air to ground transmissions and their low profile is particularly good for fast moving vehicles such as racing cars/bikes and aeroplanes/helicopters.

They can also be combined to make higher gain flat plate antennas for relatively short distance point to point requirements.

Switched Sector Antennas
Switched Sector antennas are produced by combining a series of patch antennas enabling us to shape the beam, compressing the elevation beam width to 20, 10, 5 or even 2.5 degrees to produce a reasonably high gain antenna whilst maintaining 90 degrees horizontal beam width.

These antennas are perfect for use in a medium range central receive site and four antennas can either be packaged in a single housing for tower installation or in separate housings for building installation.  A coaxial switch is used to select North, East, South, West and can be easily manually controlled or can be combined with our STC series antenna controller equipped with GPS auto selection to track helicopters etc.

Helix and Horn Antennas
Helix and Horn antennas are Ideal for medium range point to point links.  These antennas are quite compact, so easy to transport and with reasonably wide beam width (up to 20 degrees depending on frequency) very easy to point and use.  The helix design is best suited to lower frequencies, whilst the horns provide some benefit in terms of efficiency and can be specified for all frequency bands.

Both antenna types are available with N type connector or can be specified with Giga-Com quick release connectors for use with MLV-series microwave links.

Offset Antennas
The high gain, high efficiency solution for long range transmission requirements.  Giga-Com OEA-series antennas are available in all frequency bands, including dual band when required and particularly well suited to ENG vehicle mast mounting and central receive installations.

Giga-Com provides the full turn key solution including vehicle mast and antenna positioners for both transmit and receive.  Our STC series controllers also allow the antennas to automatically track each other when required.

Parabolic Antennas
Manufactured in all frequency bands, these are the antennas we recommend for use with our MLV series outside broadcast microwave links.  They combine high gain and good side lobe performance with lightweight and robust packaging so are easy to transport and can comfortably allow you to establish point to point links of 50km plus (assuming line of site and suitable frequency)

These antennas are typically supplied with N type connectors or quick release MLV-series connectors but can be specified with flanges and mast mount kits for fixed (waveguide) installations.