Wagga Wagga, Australia, 6 February 2026 – Zetifi, an Australian wireless company that designs and manufactures smart antennas for cellular and radio devices with market-leading design, has won a Silver Award in the Product Design Technology category of the 2026 BETTER FUTURE Australian Design Awards.
Zetifi’s UHF CB Smart Antenna, designed and manufactured in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, transforms the humble antenna into an intelligent connectivity hub enabling duress alerts, lone-worker check-ins, automated asset tracking, and real-time location reporting. Supported by multiple patents and a cross-functional team, the product sets a new benchmark for connected vehicle operations and safety, with practical benefits for drivers, fleets, and remote communities.
For decades, vehicle antennas for two-way radios have remained largely unchanged, simply passing signals to and from hardware hidden elsewhere in the vehicle. Zetifi’s UHF CB smart antenna is the first vehicle antenna with active electronics integrated into the housing. As a result, the point where RF enters the vehicle becomes the place where events are detected, processed and sent to the cloud. The design unifies GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular and support for UHF radios in a single compact form, enabling safety and connectivity features from the antenna itself.
“Winning this award is recognition of our expertise and insight to imagine the possibilities, develop strategies to bring them into being and pursue market opportunities with precision and patience, says Dan Winson, Founder and CEO, Zetifi. “At the same time, our ongoing success is heavily contingent on the strength of Zetifi’s relationships with our key technology partners and dealer community which has enabled our company to achieve extraordinary growth and invest in solutions to meet market the demands of businesses requiring solutions for connectivity, worker safety and compliance reporting.”
Zetifi’s UHF CB Smart Antenna started with a clear goal: improve RF performance and deliver reliable coverage for vehicles in harsh, remote environments. Safety was always central. Better connectivity meant better chances for drivers and crews to get help when matters.
Achieving that needed more than a stronger antenna. It required coordinated work across mechanical design, RF, electronics, firmware, cloud architecture, app design and continuous field testing. Early prototypes focused on signal quality and resilience. Real-world use with farmers, contractors and road crews then revealed a larger opportunity.
Customers asked simple, practical questions. Could a UHF button press raise a duress alert? Could vehicles check workers in and out automatically? Could the system confirm that radios, PPE and tools were actually on board? All while the connectivity landscape was shifting fast, with Starlink and other networks suddenly making “coverage almost everywhere” realistic for vehicles.
That changed the brief. The antenna was no longer just a way to feed a radio. By integrating GNSS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular into the housing, it became the natural place to sense location, detect nearby devices and send events to the cloud. The team iterated quickly, using on-road data and customer feedback to refine features.
The result is a smart antenna platform that replaces stacks of antennas, routers and telematics boxes. It uses Starlink and cellular for backhaul, and turns the humble UHF CB radio into a lone worker safety solution that can integrate, via open-source APIs, with enterprise platforms. At the same time, the antenna moves computing and control into the antenna itself. GNSS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular and UHF sit in one compact housing with an open API into telematics and enterprise platforms, so the antenna mount becomes a location-aware edge device.
Key innovations included in the UHF CB Smart Antenna are:
- User-centred design: UHF button presses and BLE tag events trigger duress alerts, check-ins and location reports without extra screens or apps.
- Mechanical and assembly: Parallel radome profiles allow part reuse, while a compression holder for the PCB array adds strength and supports efficient assembly and heat paths.
- RF and electronics: RF simulation plus on-road validation, using on-board electronics to log performance over thousands of kilometres, enables refinement, RF quality assurance and the use of thin coax for cable management and longevity.
- Software and ecosystem: Open APIs, over-the-air updates and work with Icom and Telstra turn the hardware into a platform for safety and fleet features.
- Test and validation: Shaker table testing and long-term field trials underpin an industry-leading 5-year warranty.
In addition, the antenna itself is designed to use energy efficiently and to last. Careful RF and electronics design minimise wasted power and support long duty cycles in harsh conditions. Rugged construction, high ingress protection and vibration-tolerant mechanics reduce failures and the need for early replacement. At the same time, standard mounting and cabling, plus over-the-air firmware updates, extend the useful life of each antenna as software and use cases evolve.
About Zetifi
Zetifi is an Australian wireless company that designs and manufactures Smart Antennas for cellular and radio devices. Its technology is used across agriculture, fleet, mining and enterprise sectors and supports telematics, telemetry and safety systems for vehicles and field equipment.
Media Contacts
Zetifi
Leslie Beckman, Head of Marketing
0419 705 391
leslie.beckman@zetifi.com
