Direction Finding Antennas and Accuracy: Part-1

Direction finding antennas are meant to be instrumental in accurately determining the direction of an incoming signal, that much we all agree on. One would thus think that a graph of accuracy vs frequency would be very obvious and clear measure of how well an antenna will do its job, and you would be very
wrong. Welcome to the world of specmanship.Specmanship is the nefarious use of data to present to the customer what he wants or expects to see, rather than what is true. It is quite possible to present antenna performance figures, like ‘accuracy’ in this case, in a way that looks fantastic on paper, but will fail to live up to the customer expectations in real life applications. This blog post will attempt to delve into the world of DF antenna accuracy to explain how it should be interpreted in the context of real-world applications.