About
A measurement operator, and nothing else.
SIGNATA exists to answer one question well: what is actually transmitting, where, and how often. Everything about how it is structured follows from keeping that answer credible.
Position
South Africa's spectrum coordination regime is being built on a database. Databases of this kind are populated from what licensees declare, and declarations are incomplete — not through bad faith, but because administrative registries can diverge from field conditions as infrastructure, assignments and operating patterns change — and the regulator has needed supplementary information requests to close gaps.
Measurement is the correction. It is also a genuinely difficult business to start: the sites take years to assemble, the historical record cannot be collected retroactively, and calibration traceability requires infrastructure rather than software. ICASA operates its own fixed spectrum-monitoring stations; what we have not found is a continuous occupancy dataset published from them, and what we have not identified is a continuously operated, independent national measurement archive of this kind in South Africa. Those difficulties are part of the reason we have not found one — and the reason it is worth doing properly.
Principles
- Neutral by structure
- We do not operate connectivity networks in competition with the parties we measure, and we do not resell or broker spectrum access.
- Measured, not modelled
- Where measurement and prediction disagree, the disagreement is the finding.
- Verifiable by a third party
- Evidentiary releases will ship with the method and the verification tool. That is a commitment — nothing is published yet, because nothing has been measured yet.
- Nothing deleted
- Indefinite retention is the design objective, under scoped and audited access, subject to law and contract. The record cannot be recreated.
- Honest about limits
- Sparse coverage, interpolation and instrument uncertainty are stated, not hidden.
Where the venture is
SIGNATA is pre-formation and founder-led. The regulatory case is documented, the technical architecture is specified, and the immediate work is a prototype sensing node, a pilot deployment, and evidence contracts tied to the upper 6 GHz feasibility study.
The platform software is further along than the hardware. A reference implementation of the data pipeline and the evidence layer runs end to end on synthetic input while the sensing hardware is designed — the evidence chain is the one part of this that cannot be retrofitted, so it was built first. What it does, and what still needs hardware.
The sensing network described elsewhere on this site is planned. No part of it is deployed yet, and we would rather say that here than have you discover it in a meeting.
The founding team
Wayne de Jager — founder (LinkedIn). Wayne was instrumental in M-Tel and the opening of South Africa's cellular network in the early 1990s, and has spent the three decades since architecting electronics and communications systems — today serving on the boards of several South African metering and energy companies, and still running his own Linux server infrastructure. Measurement is the through-line: metering is billing-grade measurement of energy, and SIGNATA is evidence-grade measurement of spectrum. It will be incorporated as an independent company alongside his other interests, not inside any of them; no entity is registered yet. If you have received correspondence from SIGNATA, it was signed by him, and he is the person who replies.
Engineering method. Hardware is developed under an adversarial review discipline whose acceptance standard is this: no design is released until every material component claim is cited to its datasheet and challenged, and no claim survives contact with a calibrated measurement that contradicts it. That is the bar the work must pass — stated as the standard, because nothing has been released yet. RF design is AI-led: Claude authors the design record and Codex, SIGNATA’s internal RF design authority, separately challenges and decides it; Wayne de Jager remains the accountable human, and an agent verdict is neither a professional engineer’s signature nor an accredited approval. The founder personally holds every manufacturing and spend decision.
SIGNATA is not a division of any network operator, equipment vendor or connectivity business, and it will not become one: it sells measurement, does not sell connectivity, and takes no commercial position in the network outcomes it measures. Design documentation is developed under an internal adversarial-review discipline — material claims on this site pass the same adversarial review — and when one fails later scrutiny, it is corrected and the correction is recorded. Physical validation arrives with the first calibrated hardware: acceptance is measured, not asserted.
Who we want to hear from
Spectrum holders in 6.425–7.125 GHz
If you operate point-to-point links or satellite uplinks in the band identified for IMT, the feasibility study will be decided on evidence about your incumbency.
Operators planning in 3.8–4.2 GHz
Coordination under the Innovation Spectrum regime depends on incumbent data. Knowing what is actually in a band before deploying into it is cheaper than discovering it afterwards.
Tower and site owners
Hosting a sensing node costs power and a mounting point. Once nodes are live, the proposed exchange returns interference visibility across your own sites — what is radiating, when, and how hard — which is not otherwise available to you.
The host proposition is being scoped now, ahead of deployment: co-site acceptance testing, installation and support expectations, and what the host receives are part of the proposal, not an afterthought.
Statutory protection mandates
If you hold a legal interference-protection obligation, continuous, traceable monitoring can provide important technical evidence in support of enforcing it.
RF and microwave engineers
We are building sensing hardware from the front end up — synthesiser, mixer, calibration, the lot. If that is your field, we would like to talk.
Institutional partners
Coordination works better with an independent measurement layer beneath it. We are interested in being that layer, not in replacing anyone.