Product Reviews

Hawking Technology's Hi-Gain 12dBi Directional Window Antenna is designed to extend the range of your wireless network in one direction. It can be connected to any wireless router with an RP-SMA connector (a TNC adaptor is also supplied) to focus the wireless signal in a particular direction. This could be useful if, for example, you only use wireless in the garden and want to direct your signal that way. Alternatively, the antenna can be connected to a compatible wireless adaptor to improve its reception of the signal from your wireless router.

The antenna can be wall-mounted or, with the provided rubber suckers, stuck to a window. In this mode it projects

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the wireless signal through the window. This is ideal if you have a building, such as an office, in your garden and want to increase wireless reception.

A 1.2m cable is supplied, which sounds like a lot but doesn't leave much to play with once you've got the antenna stuck to a window. Fortunately, RP-SMA connectors are used at both ends of the cable, so you could replace it with a slightly longer one if needs be.

To test the antenna, we connected it to a Hawking Technology 802.11g wireless router. With the router's standard antenna, we couldn't get a wireless signal at 25m. Replacing it with the 12dBi Antenna, we got similar throughputs at 1m and 15m. At 25m, we got a strong signal and saw a throughput of 3.76Mbit/s, which indicates that this antenna can increase the range and stability of your network. However, D-Link's ANT24-0700 (reviewed in last month's What's New), is an omni-directional 7dBi antenna that gave us faster throughputs at 25m. At £60 including VAT it's more expensive, though.

If you want to increase the range of your entire network, an omni-directional antenna is a better choice. But to increase performance on one network adaptor, Hawking Technology's Hi-Gain 12dBi Directional Window Antenna is good value.