I recently went off the grid and found a great small company that is quietly but effectively disrupting the hardware side of wireless communications. Best of all, this company is still largely undiscovered, and if I’m right, then simple math says it’s barely scratched the surface of its potential.

Airgain (NSDQ: AIRG) makes embedded antennas for wireless networking devices. Specifically, it makes antennas for wireless local antenna networks (WLAN), connecting two or more devices, as well as connecting them to the Internet.

For years manufacturers have settled for less than the best components in their products, including lower-quality antennas. But the market is rapidly changing, and pressures are building on manufacturers to deliver higher-quality products with the best components possible. That’s playing right into the hands of Airgain, a designer and producer of premium antennas. This small San Diego-based company, which just went public in August, sits in a highly competitive market at a critical juncture.

More Is Better

At that juncture is demand. The growth rate of the wireless transmission sector is pegged at nearly 14% from 2016 to 2020. Driving that growth is the emergence of broader bandwidth frequencies, faster transmission speeds and the overall projected growth of the Internet.

Beyond that, Airgain is a simple numbers story. In the past, mobile and wireless devices had one or two visible antennas, but the new trend is for smaller, more sophisticated antennas that are embedded (and therefore invisible) inside devices. These antennas do more work more efficiently.

It isn’t easy to make a small antenna work harder and better. What’s easy is outfitting devices with more antennas, sometimes as many as five to 10 times more to deliver faster connections. This trend for loading up on antennas is just beginning.

So why do devices need so many antennas? In a word: multitasking. For example, inside a WLAN-powered home, some users may be working while others play computer games or watch movies on Netflix. That means more data streaming on different bandwidths, and a device with one or two antennas can’t keep up.

Airgain’s antennas are currently found in home and business wireless network products including set top boxes, access points, routers, residential gateways, media adapters and digital televisions. In the future everything from cars to healthcare devices will require more antennas, but that growth in demand will come mainly from manufacturing and other industrial uses. With consumer products, the demand for more antennas is likely to come from wearables and medical devices such as heartbeat monitors and blood oxygen meters.

Manic Metrics

Although the company’s public earnings history is relatively short, Airgain did deliver promising returns in its premiere earnings announcement on Sept. 20. The company posted a 63% increase in sales, to $9.9 million from just above $6 million, and also showed a nice jump in gross profit of 79% to $4.5 million on a year-to-year basis. That performance was mostly due to increased sales. At the same time, the company delivered 15 cents per share in earnings compared to a $1.22 loss a year earlier, while the number of antennas per device sold jumped 24%, confirming our expectations for future growth.

Airgain has all the characteristics of a shiny diamond in the rough. The company, which is currently flying under the radar, offers a rare opportunity for long-term investors to get in on the ground floor of what seems to be a great growth story based both on big-picture trends and company-specific advantages.

Buy Airgain up to $17.