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Re: Topband: More anecdotal "stories" to cause one to stop and....

To: <topband@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: Topband: More anecdotal "stories" to cause one to stop and....
From: "Richard Fry" <rfry@adams.net>
Reply-to: Richard Fry <rfry@adams.net>
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:05:25 -0500
List-post: <topband@contesting.com">mailto:topband@contesting.com>
"AJ4SQ"  wrote:
... I'm not sure what plot you are referring to. Was this for a wavelength of something like 160m?

Yes.

I don't see how field values at a 100m (0.625 lambda) range and 9m (0.05625 lambda) altitude can tell us anything about the far-field behavior.

Note that such radiation may be relatively close to the radiator but is in its far-field, regardless of the terminology/convention used by NEC. The near-field/far-field boundary is located at one radiansphere from the radiator, which is lambda/2pi (see clip below). So at the 1.85 MHz frequency of my plots, that boundary is located at about 25.8 meters, and my calculations for 100 meters are about 3.88 times beyond that boundary, into the far field.

For background, I contacted Gerry Burke in January, 2012 when I was researching the basis for the comments I have been posting here. Probably most will recognize Gerry Burke as the co-author of NEC software, working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

I sent him NEC surface wave plots similar to the one I posted in this thread, and asked him, "...would you expect the fields at elevation angles of 1 to 10 degrees in these plots to continue on to the ionosphere, and under the right conditions be reflected back to the earth as skywaves?

His reply was (quoted with his permission): "The low angle 1/R fields should reach the ionosphere, although perhaps not accurately predicted by NEC, since it does not include the effects of earth curvature and the ionosphere."

G. Burke's reply should be rather conclusive on the subject.

Clip taken from Kraus' ANTENNAS FOR ALL APPLICATIONS, 3rd Edition...

http://s20.postimg.org/xavzwzxwt/Kraus_Graphic_Fields.jpg
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