The MCF is developing a National Antenna Databse (the NAD) as part of the overall MCF RF Safety Compliance Program (formerly MERCS). The NAD is a centralised database that houses Carrier/Radio Service Operator and third party antenna data that has been either supplied by the manufacturer and/or has been quality assured.

The role of the MCF RF Safety Compliance Program is to address the key issues in the deployment of mobile telephone infrastructure. This is achieved through the development and adoption of the principals set out in the ACIF Code for Deployment of Mobile Telephone Infrastructure and EME Compliance in the program.

The NAD development project seeks to remove unnecessary duplication for RF Assessors creating and maintaining their own database of antenna patterns and to set an industry baseline for data consistency. This approach will simplify the data management required to show regulatory compliance and will facilitate the update of existing assessments through an open source format that is independent of any on particular site assessment software packages.

The NAD was introduced in 2009 and the current SDX and ADX specifications can be found on the Data Exchange Formats page available here  Data Exchange Formats