On 2014-10-15 21:32:26 +0000, Brian Reay said:

Oregonian Haruspex wrote:
On 2014-10-11 16:27:04 +0000, gareth said:

Relying on someone's NEC program to number crunch to
produce the answer 42 is not the same as understanding
what is going on as an aid to didactification of novices.

And having the formulas in front of you aren't much help when they can't
account for the local ground, or nearby objects.

The only way to figure it out is to do it. The math is only helpful for
spherical cows in a vacuum.

He always preached that 'real hams' should write their our software and he
claims to be a software engineer.
Perhaps he could take a break from his busy Freecell playing schedule and
develop his own antenna modelling package. I am sure another slight delay
in his 18 year project to build a receiver can stand another slippage, it
will make a change from the much reused excuse of 'gear hobbing' problems.
This Rx must have more gears than my Rolex.

Writing software is generally one of the most frightfully boring tasks
that one can possibly do. I will say, though, that since I finally
bought Mathematica I am having more fun than I have in years with
software. This is mainly because it's easy to get from point A to
point B without screwing about with finding libraries, accounting for
memory allocation, and all the crap that traditional software
development entails.