On 22/07/2015 10:26, Brian Reay wrote:
On 22/07/15 09:33, Stephen Thomas Cole wrote:
Spike wrote:
On 22/07/2015 00:12, Roger Hayter wrote:
Spike wrote:

On 21/07/2015 23:10, Roger Hayter wrote:

Actually Spike's question, while clumsily phrased, was a perfectly
reasonable one. And the answers revealed that no-one had any real
idea about the answer. It may well be a productive field for amateur
research.

I disagree the question was clumsily phrased, but perhaps I failed to
appreciate how little is understood about the issue, otherwise I would
have posed the question with a more inclusive preamble.

I think it would have been more usefully phrased as relative signal
strengths, as the relative power actually depends as much on
propagation conditions as on the aerial, which just goes ahead radiating according
to its altitudinal intensity plot and can't really decide which type of
wave gets propagated best apart from the lobe shape, which doesn't seem
to correlate too well. BICBW Certainly, idiots mocking from a POV of
complete ignorance don't do themselves any favours.

I did use the word 'proportion' in the original, perhaps I should have
used more terms from the simpler engineering lexicon. I was concerned
when I asked the question that I'd overlooked something simple. However,
I was disappointed at the answers received, because as a group I was
left with the impression that once the energy left the antenna, no-one seemed
to have any interest in finding out what happened to it, beyond offering
the results of a modelling exercise which answered none of the points
raised. After more than a century of radio engineering, I find it
surprising that none of this has worked down to Amateur levels, and so
no-one could offer any technical insight.

After becoming interested in AR as a schoolboy, I followed the usual
path of modifying, building, operating, etc, which of course included
experimenting with aerial systems. But over the years I've come to the
conclusion that the single most important factor in a station set-up is
the ground out to 3 lambda and at least 100' in depth. Yet so few
Amateurs seem to be aware of this, and this was why I posed the question
in RRAA, and why I found the responses so disappointing.

LOL. Dig that hole deeper, OM.

If hole digging was an Olympic Sport, with Spike, Cummins & Co we could
secure a 'full sweep' of the medals.

Steph recently claimed that as he had to answer 125 questions[1] to get
a UK Full licence, in effect he is smarter than those who only answered
8, so it will be quite easy for him to answer the question.

Those with 30 years on VHF should be able to deal with the direct ray
aspects and Steph with the rest, yet both groups are technically silent,
and, one suspects, somewhat analphabetic in this area - although the UK
VHF-only Class Bs might have learned much just from reading the question.

Perhaps the solution lies somewhere in the British Library.

[1] For him the answers were written underneath the questions, and those
for the 8-question group weren't.


--
Spike

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power" - Abraham Lincoln