What We Do With Your Datasheet
September 17, 2026 · 3 min read · SiteOps Command · Updated September 27, 2026
A manufacturer’s problem with design software is narrow and it is not about features. It is this: if the tool models your camera as a generic camera, the thing that makes yours better stops existing at exactly the moment a specifier is choosing.
So rather than claim we represent hardware well, here is which fields get read, which get approximated, and where the tool refuses to fill a gap.
The rule underneath all of it
No invented numbers. Named hardware without usable datasheet radio data is planned generically and disclosed as such — never assigned fabricated figures.
That rule is worth more to a manufacturer than any accuracy claim, because its failure mode is the one that actually costs you. A tool that quietly invents a plausible specification for a device it does not have data for produces a design that looks finished, specifies somebody’s hardware, and is wrong in a way nobody sees until the install.
What is read from the datasheet
Cameras. Field-of-view projection is real projection, not a triangle: rectilinear, fisheye, and 180°/360° panoramic, with varifocal lenses interpolated from their datasheet endpoints. DORI distance calculation (IEC 62676-4) runs per zone against per-zone targets, so a camera is evaluated against what that area actually needs rather than one number for the building.
Access points. Radio specifications are datasheet-driven against IEEE 802.11ax and 802.11be, under the same no-invented-numbers rule.
The reason this matters for a channel engineer: when the design is computed from your published figures, a genuinely better lens or a genuinely better radio shows up as better coverage in the model. When it is computed from a generic profile, it does not — and a weaker competitor looks equivalent.
Two approximations, named before you find them
You will go looking. Better that these come from us.
Antenna behaviour is parametric, not imported. The model uses the gain and beamwidth in the product record rather than a pattern file, and an access point with no beamwidth on file is modelled equally in every direction. For a Wi-Fi manufacturer whose technical differentiation is the pattern, two numbers are not the pattern, and you know that better than we do.
IR beam angle is a heuristic. IR range comes from the datasheet. The 3D beam angle is an HFOV/2 heuristic rather than a datasheet field.
Why we would rather say it
A manufacturer is the one reader who will test a claim against a product they know intimately, and who can tell an approximation from a measurement at a glance. The only version of this relationship that survives that inspection is the one where the approximations were named first.
Neither of the two above is permanent. Both are the difference between “we model your hardware” as a slogan and as a statement you can check.
The narrow claim
Coverage proven from real datasheet specifications is how hardware wins a specification on its merits rather than on a brochure. Today that holds for lens geometry, DORI targets and radio specs and IR after dark, and it does not hold for antenna shape, which is modelled from two numbers.
If your hardware is in a design and specified wrongly, the RMA and the lost renewal land on you regardless of who drew it. That is the reason to care what a design tool reads.
See what DORI actually means, how IR reach is taken from the datasheet, or the camera OEM view.
Frequently asked
- What happens if a device has no usable datasheet data?
- It is planned generically and disclosed as such, and never assigned fabricated numbers. That is the rule the radio-spec pipeline is built on. A tool that invents a figure for a device it does not know produces a design that looks complete and is not.
- Are varifocal lenses modelled across their range?
- Yes — field-of-view projection interpolates a varifocal lens from its datasheet endpoints, alongside rectilinear, fisheye and 180/360 panoramic projections.
- Do you import antenna radiation pattern files?
- Not today. The model uses the gain and beamwidth in the product record rather than a pattern file, and an access point with no beamwidth on file is modelled equally in every direction. For a vendor whose differentiation is the pattern itself, that is an approximation worth knowing about before you look for it.