Airgain says its smart-antenna will improve wireless connectivity for the mass market. The Airgain MaxBeam65N and MaxBeam80N are said to be compatible with a variety of MIMO chipsets from leading manufacturers, and double signal strength and receive sensitivity, eliminating the need for multiple external antennas.
Combining multiple high-gain directional antenna elements and high isolation between each antenna beam, Airgain’s new MIMO smart antennas claim to significantly increase signal strength, range and throughput of 802.11n devices without increasing cost.
The MaxBeam65N features four independent and highly directional antenna beams to accommodate two and four radio MIMO systems in 2×2 and 4×4 configuration. Designed to operate in the 2.4GHz band, it achieves peak gain of up to 6.5dBi.
The MaxBeam80N is a three antenna beam solution for three radio systems in 2×3 and 3×3 system configurations. It supports dual band transmission in either the 2.4GHz or 5.8GHz bands, providing peak gains of up to 6.0 dBi and 8.0 dBi, respectively.
Both the MaxBeam65N and MaxBeam80N are compatible with existing draft-N systems and will support all future 802.11n standard applications. Samples of the MaxBeam65N and MaxBeam80N are available this month. Future designs will accommodate dual band operation in the 4.9GHz and 5.25GHz frequencies.
While most Wi-Fi routers have a couple of antennas, they’re not combined together. Routers constantly switch to the single antenna with the best reception. MIMO, as specified in IEEE 802.11n, combines the signals. It uses multipath routes, treated as a separate channels.
With MIMO, the maximum data rate per channel grows nearly linearly with the number of different data streams that are transmitted in the same channel.
During the 1990s as Stanford University researchers, Dr. Greg Raleigh and Dr. VK Jones (both founders of Airgo Networks), proved that the multipath characteristic of radio transmissions can be used to multiplicatively increase the capacity of a radio system. Multipath — in a MIMO system — is advantageous. The disadvantage is cost and power consumption of multiple radios.
