An easy way to remember V and H

V and H – An easy way to remember

Short blog entry this month but, I hope, quite an important one because I want to give you .

This month I want to give you an easy to remember tip, concerning antenna coverage pattern charts.

Directionality of antennas is quite important. When planning a design, fully understanding the layout of the antennas is of vital importance. Understanding (or not understanding) the layout of an antenna’s coverage can be make-or-break for a wireless design.

Quite often, I find people get difficulty in remembering two very important attributes of an antenna: the layout of its horizontal and vertical planes.

The fact isn’t helped by the vendors. Sometimes they will show us the vertical plane, and the horizontal plane, sometimes it’s the azimuth and the elevation. Other times it is a mixed combination of azimuth and vertical, or elevation and horizontal. See Diagram 1 below.

Diagram 1: Example Cisco 3700 Antenna Patterns

An easy way to remember V and H

DIAGRAM 1

 

So, the Azimuth/Horizontal pattern is as if you were looking top down on the AP viewing how its signal propagates out horizontally. The Elevation/Vertical plane is showing you the view if you stood at the side of the AP and looked at a cross section of its coverage. As you can imagine it can all get quite confusing.

What we need is an easy way to remember which way around, is which.

So, a while back (while teaching a class), I came up with something I wanted to share. It is simple, it is easy, and it should solve all your antenna-plane-remembering problems!

Azimut h contains the letter “ H ” and so does Horizontal.
Ele v ation contains the letter “ V ” and so does Vertical.

That’s it! The Azimuth shows the Horizontal view, and the Elevation shows the Vertical view. Easy, right?

Have fun remembering, and we’ll see you next month.

 

If you are looking to make your mark in the IT Industry, then NC-Expert offers excellent training courses aimed at relevant IT industry certifications – contact us today to get started.

NC-Expert Blog

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #15: You Can Always Troubleshoot Wi-Fi Without a Packet Capture

By Rie Morgan • September 30, 2026
Modern Wi-Fi systems give us an impressive amount of information. Dashboards show signal strength, channel utilization, retry rates, client health scores, roaming events, application performance, access point statistics, and enough colorful graphs to make almost any troubleshooting session feel reassuringly scientific. And all of that information is useful. I’ll freely admit that most Wi-Fi problems can be investigated without immediately reaching for a packet analyzer. But “most” and “always” are very different words. There comes a point when a Wi-Fi engineer has to stop asking what the dashboard thinks happened, and start looking at what actually happened over the air. This is where packet captures enter the discussion. A packet capture is not required for every Wi-Fi problem. If an AP has lost power, you probably don’t need Wireshark to confirm your suspicions, but when the problem involves association, authentication, roaming, retries, retransmissions, connectivity, intermittent performance, or strange client behavior, packet analysis can turn speculation into evidence . Sometimes, you simply need to see the conversation, and what really happened, to resolve the issue.

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #14: One Speed Test Tells You Everything

By Rie Morgan • September 16, 2026
We’ve all seen it happen: someone reports that the Wi-Fi is slow. A speed test is launched. The little needle races across the screen and, a few seconds later, an impressive number appears. “See? 600 Mbps. The Wi-Fi is fine.” Case closed. Except, of course, it isn’t. A speed test can be useful. It can tell you something about the performance experienced by a device at a particular location, at a particular moment, using a particular test server and network path. What it cannot do is provide a complete diagnosis of Wi-Fi health. That distinction matters because throughput is only one part of the user experience.

Wi-Fi Myth Series - Myth #13: Mesh is ALWAYS the Best Solution

By Rie Morgan • September 10, 2026
Mesh Wi-Fi has developed quite the reputation: Need coverage in the far end of the building? Mesh. Can’t get Ethernet to an access point? Mesh. Dead spot upstairs? Mesh. Need Wi-Fi in the warehouse, courtyard, annex, garage, loading dock, or that mysterious conference room where RF signals apparently go to die? Mesh. And there’s a reason for the enthusiasm. Mesh networking can be extremely useful: it can extend connectivity into places where running cable is difficult, expensive, disruptive, or simply impossible. Modern mesh systems can dynamically select paths, recover from connectivity changes, and provide remarkably capable wireless backhaul... but that doesn’t mean mesh is automatically the best architecture. Sometimes the best mesh network is the one you don’t build!