A23D09HD

A23D09HD is a microwave antenna supplied for use with Huawei microwave systems, 0.9 m in diameter, for the 23 GHz band, used with the RTN 950 radio platform. The antenna is the one component on a microwave link you cannot compensate for elsewhere: gain you do not have at the dish cannot be bought back with transmit power, and a beam you cannot hold on target is not usable gain at all.

At 23 GHz rain fade dominates the link budget. Hops are usually five to twelve kilometres, and in a wet rain region the same hop that works at 15 GHz may not meet five-nines availability here. The compensation is channel availability and smaller antennas.

Gain is 43.3 dBi with a 1 degree beamwidth. Those two figures are the same fact viewed from two sides: gain comes from concentrating the energy into a narrower beam, so a higher-gain antenna is always a narrower one. At 1 degrees this beam is very narrow indeed, and that has a practical consequence people underestimate. Half the beamwidth is 0.50 degrees, so a pointing error of a few tenths of a degree costs real signal. Alignment has to be done properly with a received-level meter rather than by eye, the mount has to be rigid, and tower twist and sway in wind become part of the link budget rather than a footnote.

It is a dual-polarised antenna, which means it can carry two independent signals on the same frequency, one horizontally polarised and one vertically. With cross-polarisation interference cancellation in the radios, that roughly doubles the capacity of the hop without using any additional spectrum, which is often the cheapest capacity available on a licensed link. It does require the matching radio configuration and usually a coupler or orthomode transducer at the feed, so it is a design decision rather than something enabled later.

This is a high-performance antenna, which in practice means it carries a shroud and radome that suppress radiation to the sides and rear. That matters for frequency coordination rather than for the wanted signal: in congested spectrum the regulator or the coordination study may require the better pattern before a channel can be assigned, and a standard-performance dish in the same position may simply not be licensable.

The data also gives a figure of 30 dB. On a Huawei antenna line these normally describe cross-polar discrimination and front-to-back ratio, but which is which varies with how the entry was written, so we will confirm against the datasheet rather than guess. If you are doing a formal interference or coordination analysis you will want the full radiation pattern envelope file, which we can request.

The mount is a compact mount, meaning the radio unit attaches directly to the antenna feed with no waveguide run between them. That is the simpler and more efficient arrangement, since every metre of waveguide costs signal, and it is what most modern links use. The mount also has to suit the pole or face it is going on, which is a mechanical question worth settling with the structural check rather than afterwards.

It is supplied with English documentation, which for an antenna means the installation and alignment instructions as well as the pattern data.

The RTN 950 is a Huawei microwave platform, and its lifecycle status is genuinely unclear. Huawei’s RTN line as a whole is still an active product family, but the position of this particular model could not be established: Huawei’s lifecycle database sits behind a login and model-level end-of-sale and end-of-support dates are not published openly.

So this page will not tell you the platform is current and will not tell you it is finished, because neither can be checked from outside. If that distinction matters to your purchase, and on microwave it often does because licensed-band links tend to live for a decade, ask us to confirm it with Huawei before you commit.

Tell us the band and channel on your licence, the path length, the availability you need to design to, and what the antenna is mounting on. We will confirm whether this dish gives you the margin you need, or propose the size that does, and flag the structural and coordination implications before you commit rather than after the order has shipped.

Green Code Technologies supplies Huawei microwave equipment, including antennas, radio units, indoor shelves and the mechanical parts that join them. We are a supplier of Huawei alongside HPE, Dell, Cisco, Samsung and Netgear, and we would rather confirm a part against Huawei’s own documentation than sell you the wrong one, which on RTN 950 equipment is worth doing. Send us the band and channel on your licence, the path, and the radio and antenna models at each end and we will come back with a straight answer.