Jer wrote:
I'm another Ham that could care less about DX! I just want to use the
proper frequency depending on the time of day/night to communicate with some
friends located around the west coast. Very few DX stations will hold a rag
chew, just slam bam, thank you mam, i.e. 599 OM !... ugh..

At any rate, if I knew more about my antennas characteristics I might could
figure out the band/end location where it would be loudest at any given
time. Is this all wet, and TOA wouldn't help in that at all?

The TOA isn't the way to get that information. What you need to do is,
first, find out what elevation angle will be used for communication on
each band at the time(s) of day of interest. Again, something like
W6ELProp is good for doing that. Second, since you're interested in
having the strongest signal, look at the signal strength reported by
W6ELProp or other propagation program at each of those times. Next, use
EZNEC to look at the gain of your antenna at the elevation angles you
found with the propagation program. Finally, add the antenna gain to the
signal strength reported by the propagation program at each band and
time. The largest number will give you the best signal. This of course
comes with the caution that propagation prediction is generally much
less accurate than antenna pattern calculation, so there can be a lot of
variability in the accuracy of the results.

I think that if you go through this exercise a few times, you won't find
much correlation between your results and the TOA.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL