Eons ago I had the opportunity to be a part of a group which had
the interesting name, "Operations Research". As a small part of
our activity we set up models of very complex manufacturing
systems using a then new methodology called "linear programming".
The specifics are unimportant.
The most important single determination we had to arrive at in
order to get useful results was to create something called "the
objective function". This multi-variable statement (equation)
contained all of the things that were considered important to
achieve with the system under study if you wanted "good"
performance. The individual variables had a coefficient which
allowed weighting each of the objective function components.
The above is a "non rigorous" description written simply to
establish the point that "goodness" of something is usually
complex and multivariable and that before everyone gets too
carried away with measurements and data and reproducibility of
results and significance of any experiment it may be well to see
if there is some sort of agreement on what the variables are that
should be included in the objective function for "antenna
goodness"
Once we achieve agreement (or at least know our differences) on
the components of the objective function we can start arguing
about the coefficients of each variable. In the end, everyone can
have their personalized objective function. It might even be
possible to communicate to each other what our personalized
function has for weighting. In that case it might even be that
there would be agreement that for a given set of weights a
particular antenna or antenna system has a goodness value of "X".
Tod, K0TO
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