Types of Antennas and Their Functions

What is an antenna?

An antenna is a transducer used to transform RF (radio-frequency) signals traveling on a wire into an electromagnetic wave or vice versa. It plays a crucial role in strengthening the wireless connectivity of your IoT devices. There are different types of antennas that you can choose based on their respective functions.

What are the different types of antennas?

LoRa® Antenna

LoRa antennas are used to receive and transmit radio signals between the end devices (sensors) and the gateways.

LTE Antenna

Long Term Evolution or "LTE" antennas are used for cellular communications. They can be used for your Cellular IoT solution utilizing Low Power Cellular Networks like NB-IoT.

GPS Antenna

GPS or "Global Positioning System" antennas are primarily known as part of tracking solutions. In IoT gateways, GPS is used to give accurate timestamps to the data received.

Now that you know the difference between the types of antennas, the next question is where can you get one?

Antenna. A Guide to Selection, Positioning and More. - RAKwireless - IoT Made Easy

This article will present basic concept about antennas, give guidelines on antenna types used in systems such as GPS, LoRaWAN®, Cellular and compare RAK antennas.

RAKwirelessRAKwireless

Solution providers like RAKwireless offer LoRa, LTE, and GPS antenna. Most of these are made of fiber optics to ensure long life. LoRa antenna‘s typically have omnidirectional elements to receive and transmit data from multiple directions and support different LoRa bands. They also vary in antenna gain to increase the ranges they can reach.

Finally, we ask the most important question: what can you do with it?

With LoRa antennas, you can optimize the coverage and sensitivity of your LoRa gateways and improve the range of the sensor without changing its location. Choosing the right antenna for your RAK hotspot miner can extend coverage, and with more reliable network coverage, you can maximize your $HNT revenue.

With an LTE antenna, you can create your cellular IoT using already well-known cellular networks worldwide.

For GPS, you can create precise asset tracking solutions for logistics, manufacturing, and industrial applications.

Whether you choose LoRa, LTE, GPS or BLE antenna, these antennas will ensure your devices can easily communicate with each other and extend your network coverage.

Discover our different kinds of antennas today! Visit the RAK Store.