[TowerTalk] Tower placement

[Jim Lux]

At 08:58 AM 6/26/2005, Bill Axelrod wrote:
>Paul,
>
>      I'm not sure I have any meaningful conclusions.  I took the advice I
>got and modeled the terrain against my planned antenna.  Spent a lot of time
>at it and have no viable answers.  I guess the terrain is confused enough
>that any location provides a different set of answers with no clear winner.
>The only "bad" area is to the south and that's no matter where I put it.


Which is actually a pretty useful conclusion from modeling.. what it means 
is that you can ignore propagation as a siting criteria, and obssess about 
some other aspect. Like where it will make the coax runs shortest, or where 
it will be visually most impressive (or, perhaps least obtrusive), or where 
it's cheapest to dig the base and get the concrete truck into.

This, to me, is one of the most useful things about modeling.  It's not the 
gnat's eyelash predictions of performance, but the general understanding 
about what's good, bad, or indifferent.



>      So, I gave up the science and picked a spot where I have the fewest
>trees to remove and one that's not in the XYL's view from the back deck.  It
>will be about 100 ft from the edge of the shelf which gently (30 ft frop
>over 100 ft) drops to the North West thru North East.