[TowerTalk] Navigation Help for Contest Antenna Patterns

[John Brosnahan]

I'm in the process of packing things up for the
year-long move to the new Texas site and read the
article on line-of-sight calculations in the latest
issue of QEX.  It gives you a plot of the terrain
between two points, which is useful for VHF to
microwave coverage, but I also thought it would
be interesting to see terrain profiles along various
headings to get an idea of HF antenna performance
for evaluating the new site for contesting and DXing.

It would be helpful if I had a program (or a web site)
that would do the needed calculations to get the
longitude and latitude of the requisite second
locations.  I want to be able to input my own
longitude and latitude and have the program
(or web site) calculate a new longitude and latitude
that is X miles away along a true heading of Y degrees
and handles the spherical geometry properly.

I have seen some programs that will give you a
distance and angle between two sets of longitudes
and latitudes, but not one that calculates a new
longitude and latitude based on a distance and bearing
from a known longitude and altitude.

These sets of data will be submitted to the web site
mentioned in the article in QEX and batch run to
provide some profiles in a day or two.  Think it is
an interesting project and I plan to run profiles
every ten degrees or so.

http://www.tiac.net/users/reilly/

I would write a program or spread sheet to do this
or do the calculations manually, but this is a project
that I shouldn't be wasting any time on (but is
interesting) so I thought if someone had already done
the work or knew of a web sight it would make it
easy enough so that I could sneak it into the list of
things I am already over-committed on!

Thanks,

John  W0UN


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