Do you need to rely on field testing to discover a problem that apparently causes a 50-75dB signal degradation? The antenna itself would have been designed by a

Do you need to rely on field testing to discover a problem that apparently causes a 50-75dB signal degradation? The antenna itself would have been designed by a group of RF engineers who would have also realized they were designing an external antenna so the issue must have come up at some point. Whatever the issue is I don't think secrecy plays a big role. Inexperience and naivety? Yeah. Maybe they just didn't realize that out of millions of units a good number of people were going to hold them the "wrong way" and have issues. Short of handing out thousands of test units I'm not sure they could have uncovered this. That's the risk of doing something different.