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Re: [TowerTalk] Cover antennas - the good news and the bad news

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Cover antennas - the good news and the bad news
From: Jim Brown <jim@audiosystemsgroup.com>
Reply-to: jim@audiosystemsgroup.com
Date: Sat, 31 Oct 2020 11:44:33 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 10/31/2020 6:15 AM, jimlux wrote:
This is a pretty standard technique these days - They use it for calibrating radio telescope arrays, for instance.

Great tutorial, Jim! Two other important variables for earthbound antenna measurements are 1) terrain and 2) soil conductivity. You can't do this just anywhere. :) The N0AX/K7LXC test ranges were well chosen, but they tell us nothing about vertical pattern.

More than thirty years ago, thanks to greater computer power, those of us working in pro audio accomplished major advances in both acoustic measurement and acoustic modeling. One of the most powerful tools, and the earliest that got us all started, and the earliest, was Time Delay Spectrometry, invented by Richard Heyser, an engineer who worked at JPL on space communications. When he died early of cancer, he was President Elect of the Audio Engineering Society.

Computing power led to 3D modeling of loudspeaker systems in models of real acoustic spaces, taking into account the complex (mag, phase) response of speakers and arrays of speakers, over nine octaves, and computing responses over an audience. This required 3D measurement of loudspeakers in 5 degree increments of azimuth and elevation, and of the reflection/absorption properties of all of the surfaces in the acoustic model. Modeling had to take into account variations in the acoustic center of loudspeakers, and compute complex time response to every wall surface, and over audience areas. Once the model was complete, the response at any point could be convolved with a .WAV file of speech to assess speech intelligibility. All of this was well developed by the late '90s, and continued advancing thereafter.

Thanks to the broad frequency range of audio, and the extent to which reflections from room surfaces must be considered and added to compute both the responses and the room reverberant field, this modeling is several orders of magnitude more complex than what we're doing with antennas! Two of largest spaces I modeled at this degree of complexity were the Staple Center and the Nokia Center (now known as the 7,000-seat Microsoft Theater) nearby.

73, Jim K9YC

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