Patents protect the owner from competition. Ie, if your intent is to use
patented ideas/inventions for monetary gain but selling the antennas you
built using them, then you could be potentially infringing on the patent(s).
If this is for your personal use, then "fair use" applies & you can
duplicate patented inventions. The grey area is if you give it away, where
some cases are judged to cause damage to the patent-holder from loss of
revenue, others where the cases were deemed fair use.
There are plenty of examples over the past decade in particular of baseless
patents being awarded, and we're constantly seeing them invalidated in court
these days. Antenna dimensions would typically fall into that category, as
a patent can only be valid for "innovative" ideas where there is "no similar
prior art" and that is "not obvious" or "not easily discoverable". It is
obvious what antenna element dimensions are or should be via commonly known
and public related mathematics, tools for determining such (eg, modeling
programs, empirical measurement devices, etc), ease of determining this even
if it includes measuring someone else's work.
Copyrights would not apply to antenna dimensions themselves, but would apply
to any direct copies (eg, photcopy) you make of a drawing or document that
is copyrighted. You make your own drawing of another's design, and you own
the copyright to that drawing. The only exception I'm aware of to this is
in the case of computer source, meta, or executable code where simply
manually re-keying the same code instructions and compiling or publishing is
deemed the same as making an electronic copy.
"Proprietary" simply means that a party owns the information or methods,
that it's not in the "public domain", and that a third party *may* need to
obtain rights to the info/method from the owner. The metric or english
measurement mtehod systems are in the public domain, so is the counting
systems (eg, base 10 numbers & symbols we use), etc. Proprietary
information does not necessarily mean that it is "secret". "Trade secrets"
do have legal meaning in most states and are often protected by laws that
are separate from patent/copyright/trademark laws, but to be such the owner
must take "reasonable" means of protecting their secrets. Obviously,
antenna element dimensions are not Trade Secrets, as anyone can whip out a
tape measure and gain that info quickly.
-----Original Message-----
From: antennaware-bounces@contesting.com
[mailto:antennaware-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of dan edwards
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 10:11 AM
To: antennaware@contesting.com
Subject: [Antennaware] studying legacy KLM 20m big stick with eznec5
guys:
i found the factory dimensions of the old 58' boom 6 element KLM 20 at
W5WMU.
he still has two; or at least most of the pieces of two of them.
I modeled the parasitic elements with eznec 5, including the taper
correction with actual element diameters and specified lengths, and replaced
the dual driven elements with a single driven element.
this thing has a deserved reputation for being a 'HOSE'...looks very nice.
to me, anyway. decent gain for boom length, and fairly clean pattern, across
the whole band.
curiously, though, by tweaking the single driven element length, i get a
pretty nice swr / freq bandwidth with it fed DIRECTLY with 50 ohms. was
thinking of applying the 'owa' approach with an additional director, closely
spaced to the driven element, but it does not seem necessary.
Is this an artifact or error? i'm modelling it at 70' over 'real-hi
accuracy' ground.
Are these dimension proprietary or copywrite or patent protected?
we are slowly repairing hurricane damage at W5WMU, but this time, using
EZNEC to re-deploy the useable aluminum. hopefully the best way.
73 from texas, W5XZ, dan
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