On Jan 25, 8:14 pm, Jake Brodsky wrote:
Ron J wrote:
So I was doing some reading and one article mentioned that a group
mounted anFMtransmitteron ahotairballoon. I was also researching
on the methods used by the FCC to measured field strengths. So how does
one go about measuring field strength levels if a company somewhere,
somehow, sometime decides to mount theirtransmitteron ahotair
balloonto avoid building a tower?

Because the communications are likely to be line of sight, you could
use
inverse square law equations to predict the signal strength.

Actually, no, inverse square (free space) will underestimate the
received signal strength. There's also a "height above the ground"
factor that would need to be taken into account for UHF and VHF links,
because the ground reflections are significant on both ends of the
link.

A program called Radio Mobile (google for it) can do the modeling over
your terrain.
Or, you can probably find one of the quick approximations for uniform
terrain. The usual model is called Longley-Rice, but Bullington has a
quick approximation.