[Sarantel] What do those dashes on top of most antennas mean?

[Horsa]

Q: What do those dashes on top of most Sarantel antennas mean?

The ceramic elements of most antennas are marked with dashes to represent their frequency class. Sarantel had 4 different class variants of the SL1200 element to cater for customer applications. In general, the last digit of the product code for the antenna is representative of the frequency class by the number of dashes, i.e. SL1201 has 1 dash whereas SL1203 has 3 dashes. The only exception to this is for the active devices SL1204 and SL1206.

Initially the SL1204 and SL1206 were going to use an antenna specifically tuned for the application: class 5 (= 5 dashes). The material of the radome was changed and the antenna tuning altered so that the frequency of the antenna ended up being the same as the SL1202 antenna. It was decided that the class 5 would not be used and the same antenna would be used for SL1202, SL1204 and SL1206 which will be marked with 2 lines. The SL1205 / class 5 / 5 dashes antenna was never used.