Jim is right. There is almost no difference in a V and a catenary as far
as the antenna is concerned.

It would really wind up being an exercise of "can we really model a
catenary?"

If anyone disagrees, we will do it. (NOTE: I said "we", not just me)

John S wrote in :

Jim is right. There is almost no difference in a V and a catenary as far
as the antenna is concerned.

It would really wind up being an exercise of "can we really model a
catenary?"

If anyone disagrees, we will do it. (NOTE: I said "we", not just me)


No worries, I'm willing to accept that, now and as of last night's talk too.
This is useful to me as it is, it gives a good example of diminishing returns
in some lines of exploration.

John S wrote:
Jim is right. There is almost no difference in a V and a catenary as far
as the antenna is concerned.

It would really wind up being an exercise of "can we really model a
catenary?"

If anyone disagrees, we will do it. (NOTE: I said "we", not just me)

It depends on how close you want the model to be, but in general all you
do is break the catenary, or any curve you want, into a series of
straight line segments.



--
Jim Pennino

On 10/13/2014 12:38 PM, wrote:
John S wrote:
Jim is right. There is almost no difference in a V and a catenary as far
as the antenna is concerned.

It would really wind up being an exercise of "can we really model a
catenary?"

If anyone disagrees, we will do it. (NOTE: I said "we", not just me)

It depends on how close you want the model to be, but in general all you
do is break the catenary, or any curve you want, into a series of
straight line segments.

Yes, of course. And, with the free version of EZNEC, one must be careful
not to exceed the max segments allowed.

John S wrote in :

Yes, of course. And, with the free version of EZNEC, one must be careful
not to exceed the max segments allowed.


I've started reading the manual, I suspect there's little danger of that.
At least with EZNEC+ 4 onwards, not sure about standard version. I suspect
like curves built in segments in Sketchup, or the straight bars in the chains
of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the amount of fine tuning you'll get in
using more than about 24 segments for a catenary might be an exercise in
diminishing returns, and that even just 3 to 5 might be adequate, if the
deviation from straight is small.

In message ,
Lostgallifreyan writes
John S wrote in :

Yes, of course. And, with the free version of EZNEC, one must be careful
not to exceed the max segments allowed.


I've started reading the manual, I suspect there's little danger of that.
At least with EZNEC+ 4 onwards, not sure about standard version. I suspect
like curves built in segments in Sketchup, or the straight bars in the chains
of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the amount of fine tuning you'll get in
using more than about 24 segments for a catenary might be an exercise in
diminishing returns, and that even just 3 to 5 might be adequate, if the
deviation from straight is small.

I did a simple sagging 40m dipole on MMANA using the wire editor with
9 wires. I had a 3m sag in the middle . I ran the optimiser for best
match. The impedance worked out at 69 ohm and the gain was 2.06dBi. The
model reported a lobe elevation of about 8 degrees. There was a
vertically polarised component at 90 degrees to the horizontal lobe at
-15dBi.

You'd expect something like this to happen since there is part of the
antenna in the vertical plane.

Brian GM4DIJ
--
Brian Howie

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On 10/16/2014 3:29 PM, Brian Howie wrote:
In message ,
Lostgallifreyan writes
John S wrote in :

Yes, of course. And, with the free version of EZNEC, one must be careful
not to exceed the max segments allowed.


I've started reading the manual, I suspect there's little danger of
that.
At least with EZNEC+ 4 onwards, not sure about standard version. I
suspect
like curves built in segments in Sketchup, or the straight bars in the
chains
of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the amount of fine tuning you'll get in
using more than about 24 segments for a catenary might be an exercise in
diminishing returns, and that even just 3 to 5 might be adequate, if the
deviation from straight is small.

I did a simple sagging 40m dipole on MMANA using the wire editor with
9 wires. I had a 3m sag in the middle . I ran the optimiser for best
match. The impedance worked out at 69 ohm and the gain was 2.06dBi. The
model reported a lobe elevation of about 8 degrees. There was a
vertically polarised component at 90 degrees to the horizontal lobe at
-15dBi.

You'd expect something like this to happen since there is part of the
antenna in the vertical plane.

Brian GM4DIJ

Excellent info, Brian. Thanks for that.

Cheers,
John KD5YI

On 10/16/2014 3:29 PM, Brian Howie wrote:
In message ,
Lostgallifreyan writes
John S wrote in :

Yes, of course. And, with the free version of EZNEC, one must be careful
not to exceed the max segments allowed.


I've started reading the manual, I suspect there's little danger of
that.
At least with EZNEC+ 4 onwards, not sure about standard version. I
suspect
like curves built in segments in Sketchup, or the straight bars in the
chains
of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, the amount of fine tuning you'll get in
using more than about 24 segments for a catenary might be an exercise in
diminishing returns, and that even just 3 to 5 might be adequate, if the
deviation from straight is small.

I did a simple sagging 40m dipole on MMANA using the wire editor with
9 wires. I had a 3m sag in the middle . I ran the optimiser for best
match. The impedance worked out at 69 ohm and the gain was 2.06dBi. The
model reported a lobe elevation of about 8 degrees. There was a
vertically polarised component at 90 degrees to the horizontal lobe at
-15dBi.

You'd expect something like this to happen since there is part of the
antenna in the vertical plane.

Brian GM4DIJ

By the way, Brian, do you have data of the non-sagging model for
comparison? Don't do it unless it is fun for you. The data looks just
about the same for a non-sagger anyway. A comparison would show the
small differences.

Super work! Thanks.

"Brian Howie" wrote in message
...
I did a simple sagging 40m dipole on MMANA using the wire editor with
9 wires. I had a 3m sag in the middle . I ran the optimiser for best
match. The impedance worked out at 69 ohm and the gain was 2.06dBi. The
model reported a lobe elevation of about 8 degrees. There was a
vertically polarised component at 90 degrees to the horizontal lobe
at -15dBi.


I know you did that for an example, but 3 meters of sag for a 40 meter
dipole is a lot of sag. I bet the ends were close together.
About 1 meter of sag would be more like it.




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John S wrote:
On 10/13/2014 12:38 PM, wrote:
John S wrote:
Jim is right. There is almost no difference in a V and a catenary as far
as the antenna is concerned.

It would really wind up being an exercise of "can we really model a
catenary?"

If anyone disagrees, we will do it. (NOTE: I said "we", not just me)

It depends on how close you want the model to be, but in general all you
do is break the catenary, or any curve you want, into a series of
straight line segments.

Yes, of course. And, with the free version of EZNEC, one must be careful
not to exceed the max segments allowed.

Not really a problem as it does not take many segments to represent the
ends, which has a slow change, as the center part with a more rapid
change.

If I were going to do it, I would use something like a spreadsheet
to plot the curve then draw straight line segments on the curve and
plug those directly into EZNEC.

The extreme case is modeling a loop as a geometric figure with straight
side.

EZNEC will generate loops with whatever number of sides you want and
thus it is fairly easy to see when increasing the number of sides
gives diminishing returns in the difference between the loops.


--
Jim Pennino