John Smith I wrote:
John Smith I wrote:

[stuff]

This:
"Our Technical Coordinator, Rob, K1DFT was guest presenter at the April
5th meeting of the Dallas (Texas) Amateur Radio Club. He thrilled a
packed house with a multimedia presentation concerning his invention,
the Distributed Loaded Monopole or DLM.
Rob telephoned me after the event in addition to one of my Dallas
friends who was in the audience to tell me how well the presentation was
received. Congratulations Rob!! The Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC)
antenna testing range performed a full day of tests on a great many
different versions of the DLM just the week before he left for Texas and
validated every one of the DLM’s performance claims. That should quiet
the nay sayers out there who wanted proof of the antenna’s efficiency
and bandwidth."

If the NUWC range is like most other ranges, it's a facility that is
essentially for rent to anybody who wants to use it. The range provides
the site, the equipment, and the technicians. You tell them what tests
you want to run, operate your equipment if needed, and they make the
measurements and give you the data. As a rule, they'd make no
substantive evaluation of the worth of anything tested there. You could
hire them to make measurements on a 100ft spool of 20year old zipcord
sitting on a folding chair, and they'd happily fire up the signal
generator, measure the field strength, etc. It's not even all that
expensive.. It could be something like $1000 to do a day's testing, and
in comparison to what URI has already paid for their patent applications
and K1DFT's salary, that's not a big deal. It might even be cheaper,
since there's a variety of programs for government facilities to provide
services and such to universities. If the range wasn't otherwise being
used, all the equipment and staff is sitting around anyway, so the
differential cost to run the tests is small.

In other words, to say that "the range performed tests and validated
claims" is probably not technically true. The range performed the
tests, and presumably provided a report of the data they collected. The
validation of claims is up to the person who writes the analytical
report who takes the test data (presumably with it's measurement
uncertainties identified) and shows that test data matches expected
values within experimental error.



From he
http://www.arrlri.org/modules/news/a...php?storyid=12

JS