On 1/15/2026 4:23 AM, Brian Beezley wrote:
I've thought about what it might take to make radiation pattern
measurements over complex terrain with a drone. But it's a complicated
problem with many hidden sources of error. When I was considering this,
each day I'd wake up with a new source of error that hadn't occurred to
me the day before. I think it would be easy to get in over your head
without ever knowing it. A computer program validated with fishy data is
not worth anyone's attention.
I'm a strong believer in never letting the perfect be the enemy of the
good. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The
early explorers, Columbus and others, didn't have a clue when they set
sail, but here we are.
When I was modeling my terrain in 2006, The first time I used HFTA, I
ran one radial taking data off of a terrain map, point by point,
building a data file. Dean advised me to take the data farther and at
smaller intervals, knowing my terrain. Advances in the state of the art
is never the result of throwing up our hands.
Like many here, I've been doing this stuff for a while. As a co-op EE
student at U of Cincy, I had a gig in the office of Pete Johnson's
consulting biz, which specialized designing arrays to fit new stations
into the AM band that had been full for 20 years. A bunch of us sat
around a boardroom table with 20+ column paper spreadsheets, slide
rules, and Bessel function tables computing every five degrees of az and
elevation. The next week, I'd plot field strength for radials from FCC
ground data. To get 10kW daytime for his own station on 680 kHz, he ran
radials in the direction of WLW on 700 kHz to improve on that data, and
eventually got the license.
Pete and Carl Smith (better known for CREI) wrote the AM technical Rules
after WWII. I learned a lot from that gig.
73, Jim K9YC
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