[TowerTalk] HFTA interpretation

Peter Dougherty w2irt at comcast.net
Wed May 30 00:23:07 EDT 2007


Hi all,

Now that I'm becoming quite comfortable with HFTA and MicroDEM, I 
have a very practical question that's been bugging me for a few days.

At 20 degrees I have a clean shot terrain-wise. At 40, I'm hitting a 
hill and at 60 degrees (i.e. straight-on at Europe), it's a 
full-fledged mountain, with much higher-angles coming into play. I've 
plotted 20/30/45/60 degrees in HFTA, and the low-angle performance is 
significantly worse at 60.

What I'm wondering, using a 3el antenna at 72 feet, if I'm hunting 
Europe, am I better off beaming 20-30 degrees to make better use of 
low-angle signals to my tower (but being 30-40 degrees off short 
path), or should I just forget about the low-angle issue and go for 
the directivity/gain of the antenna itself?



Cheers,

Peter,
W2IRT 



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