Community Antenna Reports

The Meshtastic community maintains an open library of VNA-measured antenna test reports: real bench data on the antennas people actually buy, including the stock whips that ship in the box. It is the best answer available to "is this $6 antenna any good?"

This page indexes those reports so you can find one fast. Every row links to the original PDF in the meshtastic/antenna-reports repository, which is where the data lives and gets updated. We deliberately do not host copies here: the upstream repo is the source of truth, and a stale copy of a measurement is worse than no copy.

Want our own independent numbers? We swept five antennas on the NWIMesh bench: 915 MHz Antenna Comparison (measured).

How to read these reports

Each report shows an SWR (standing wave ratio) sweep across frequency, usually with a Smith chart.

• SWR at 906 to 915 MHz is what matters. That is where we operate. An antenna can be excellent at 950 MHz and useless to us.
• Lower is better, and below about 2.0 is fine. SWR 1.0 is perfect; 1.5 is very good; 2.0 loses roughly 11% of your power to reflection; above 3.0 you are wasting real transmit power and some radios start protecting themselves.
• A perfect SWR does not mean a good antenna. A dummy load has perfect SWR and radiates nothing. SWR tells you power is getting into the antenna, not that the antenna is radiating usefully. Treat it as a screening test that catches bad antennas, not proof of gain.
• Be skeptical of printed gain. Several cheap antennas advertise gain figures that the physics of their size cannot support. The dimensions column is a useful reality check: a 50 mm whip is not an 8 dBi antenna.
• Height still beats gain. See the Antenna & Placement Guide before you spend money.

On the prices below: they are the prices recorded at the time each report was written and many are now well out of date. Use them for rough ranking only, and check the hardware page or the retailer for what something actually costs today.

915 MHz — fixed and base station

The category that matters most for infrastructure nodes.

Not sure which? The ALFA is the best value we have measured ourselves, and the 5.8 dBi Rokland kit with coax and bracket is the least fiddly way to get a rooftop node on the air in one box.

915 MHz — portable and handheld

Note that all three stock antennas tested came back "No". If you are running the whip that came in the box, a $7 replacement is the cheapest upgrade available to you.

Replacing a stock whip is the single cheapest upgrade on this page: a tuned 915 MHz flexible whip costs about the same as lunch.

915 MHz — vehicle

Also useful for vehicles: 915 MHz magnetic mount antennas. Getting the antenna onto the roof matters more than the antenna itself, as our vehicle node notes explain.

915 MHz — internal (inside an enclosure)

For custom builds where the antenna lives inside the case.

These two are stocked mainly by component distributors such as Digi-Key and Mouser, where the exact part numbers above will find them directly.

868 MHz (Europe)

Included for completeness. Do not use 868 MHz antennas on NWIMesh: we operate on 915 MHz, and an 868 MHz antenna is a poor match here. No buy links, for that reason.

Contribute a report

Have a VNA? The project takes contributions, and the 433 MHz and 860 MHz bands have no data at all yet. Grab the fillable report template, sweep your antenna, and open a pull request against meshtastic/antenna-reports.

If you would rather not deal with GitHub, bring your results to our Discord and we will help get them upstream.

Reports and measurements are the work of the Meshtastic community and are published in meshtastic/antenna-reports under the GPLv3. Manufacturer names and models are the property of their respective owners. We link to the originals rather than mirroring them, so you always get the current version.