You've just seen a parade of people confirming the general usefulness of
this application and the fact that there isn't ANYTHING else out there
that even tries to do what it does, and you think it's an "overrated"
and "half-baked" program that's "a waste of time"? Seriously??
HFTA itself is almost trivial to use and the only difficult part is
generating the terrain files for your specific location. The more or
less automated way of doing that with peripheral applications like
Microdem is indeed fairly complex and intimidating, but you don't need
to go that route to get your terrain files.
The terrain files (the ones with the .pro file extension) for HFTA are
in about the simplest text format you could imagine. Open one of them
with any text editor (was that really so difficult to figure out?) and
you'll see what I mean. The files have a left hand column for distance
from the tower base and a right hand column for height relative to the
tower base. That's all ... no column headers, no restrictions on choice
of distances, and no practical limit to the number of data pairs. A
brief sample of a terrain file showing a slight mound in front of a
tower and then a gradual decline beyond that might look like this:
0 150
20 155
50 160
100 165
200 165
300 165
400 160
500 155
1000 150
2000 145
3000 140
etc
If you have the patience you can draw a line on Google Earth and
manually pick the numbers directly from that to load into any text
editor. A bit tedious, but simple and effective. I've done it myself,
although I generally find it quicker to manually pull the numbers from
the terrain profile that DeLorme's 3D Topo software generates. I've
used HFTA a lot, both for my QTH and for a few friends, and I've never
used Microdem. I don't bother to generate files every five degrees
azimuth or anything like that. I just pick the key locations I want to
hit (Europe, Japan, Central Asia, South America, Central Africa, etc)
and even in the mountainous terrain around my QTH about six or eight
terrain files suffice to tell me what I want to know.
Dave AB7E
On 3/4/2012 2:01 AM, Mark Robinson wrote:
> I think that it would be pointless running the program on flat ground.
> No-one has ever been able to help me run the program with real data even
> though they offered to try, so I just had to guess when putting up my tower.
> It seems to me that this program is overrated and a waste of time since very
> people can actually make it work. Finding the coordinates of my tower is the
> easy part.
>
> Sorry for the rant but I am so frustrated with this program and the lack of
> any useful instructions on how to use it. Another half baked good idea in
> my book.. I put my beam at 87 1/2 feet and just worked DX.
>
> Mark N1UK
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Gilbert"<xdavid@cis-broadband.com>
> To:<towertalk@contesting.com>
> Sent: Saturday, 03 March, 2012 10:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Where to get HFTA Software
>
>
>> I think that may be a bit of an exaggeration, especially since as others
>> have pointed out here you're not really certain where "ground" is anyway
>> ... certainly not within inches and probably not within several feet in
>> many locations.
>>
>> Dave AB7E
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 3/3/2012 7:48 PM, dotravel@aol.com wrote:
>>>
>>> Note that unless the site is on flat ground just entering the QTH
>>> location would not be enough. For the data to be of value, the location
>>> of the tower needs to be within feet if not inches prior to importing
>>> into HFTA.
>>>
>>> Regards, John NA6L
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> TowerTalk mailing list
>> TowerTalk@contesting.com
>> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
> _______________________________________________
>
>
>
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