[TowerTalk] elephants, antennas and propogation

[alsopb]

Pet peeve time.

For what it's worth. I had a professor who espoused knowing as much as
one
could about the theory of how something worked before going out,
measuring something
and concluding anything.

His story was the following.

You want to know what an elephant looks like.  You go out and view the
backside of
the elephant only.  Does he have a trunk, does he have big ears or is
he made up of
just two big cracks and a tail?

He also pointed out: If you just knew that the line of symmetry was
from head to tail you could have looked at him from the side and
gotten a good picture of what an 
elephant looks like.

It seems like a lot of the antenna and propagation conclusions here
are based upon sampling just the rear of the elephant.  

The guys who have the theoretical background and are kind enough to
share this with us
are pretty much ignored.   

Every time I hear "my G5RV is the best antenna or my 2 element XYZ
antenna has 10 db gain or you can use R25 without guys" I think of the
old Prof.

Maybe it's my hang up but I'd rather try and understand the big
picture before judging the merit of results obtained from sampling the
elephant's behind.

Brian/K3KO

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