Industrial Communications Handbook August 2016

indication of the Gain: the higher the Gain, the narrower the beam width. Remember, you are Robbing Peter to pay Paul. The higher the gain, the more difficult it is to ‘point’ in the correct direction. Thus, if your transducers etc are on the periphery of your plant, and the control communications hub is cen- tral, directive antennas may be more useful, communi- cating to an omnidirectional antenna at the centre point. One more point about Gain, it not only concentrates the energy where you want it, but it also concentrates it away from where you don’t want it. This is the very sim- plest form of data security, which, when combined with power control, is often overlooked as ‘too trivial’, but is vitally important. Do NOT automatically set all wireless activity to ‘max power’. So radiation pattern gives an idea of where to point an antenna. It also gives an idea as to where NOT to point the antenna. Remember that metal will reflect any EM wave thrown at it. Hence putting a vertical Omni on the metal walling of a mine tunnel is just plain silly. Putting an electricity smart meter with a GSM anten- na in a metal cabinet likewise. (Yep, its been done …)

Gain that is above this reference level is greater than the isotopic, measured in deciBels, and hence positive dBi (in that direction). Gain below this value is thus neg- ative (in that direction). Integrating the power over an enclosing sphere must therefore always give 0dBi. What you win on the swings, you MUST lose on the roundabouts. In industrial communications, it is usual to use simple dipoles, as shown in Figure 2.2 (they look like mono- poles, but are not!) since the placement of the equip- ment is not known. The Radiation Pattern of a dipole is a doughnut, with the vertical dipole upright in the ‘hole’ of the doughnut, as shown in Figure 2.6. The maximum Gain, in the Azi- muth plane, is 2,16dBi, or 2dBi for short.

Figure 2.6: Doughnut radiation pattern of vertical dipole.

The problem, of course, is the ‘hole’ of the doughnut. The dipole does not radiate at all in the axial direction (up and down). So the only reason a dipole has a posi- tive gain of 2 dBi around the middle is because it has massively negative dBi North and South. Therefore a ‘High-Gain antenna’ simply must radi- ate incredibly badly elsewhere. It cannot radiate at high gain in all directions! A High-gain Omni is an oxymoron, unless it is understood that it is Omni in only one plane. A common antenna with a high gain is of course the Yagi-Uda array, or Yagi, stalwart of terrestrial TV recep- tion. The majority of the radiation occurs in a single beam, but significant amounts of power are still radi- ated elsewhere: Murphy again. The main beam half- power points at (−3 dB), measured in degrees give an

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industrial communications handbook 2016