I said or meant to say that the HFTA program is a good idea (in fact I think
that it is a great idea) but extracting the data to use the HFTA is difficult
to do and is a half baked process.
73 Mark N1UK
----- Original Message -----
From: David Gilbert
To: Mark Robinson
Cc: towertalk@contesting.com
Sent: Sunday, 04 March, 2012 12:00 PM
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Where to get HFTA Software
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
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