[TowerTalk] Where to get HFTA Software

[Mark Robinson]

I said or meant to say that the HFTA program is a good idea (in fact I think that it is a great idea) but extracting the data to use the HFTA is difficult to do and is a half baked process.


73 Mark N1UK
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Gilbert 
  To: Mark Robinson 
  Cc: towertalk at contesting.com 
  Sent: Sunday, 04 March, 2012 12:00 PM
  Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Where to get HFTA Software



  You've just seen a parade of people confirming the general usefulness of this application and the fact that there isn't ANYTHING else out there that even tries to do what it does, and you think it's an "overrated" and "half-baked" program that's "a waste of time"?   Seriously??    

  HFTA itself is almost trivial to use and the only difficult part is generating the terrain files for your specific location.  The more or less automated way of doing that with peripheral applications like Microdem is indeed fairly complex and intimidating, but you don't need to go that route to get your terrain files.

  The terrain files (the ones with the .pro file extension) for HFTA are in about the simplest text format you could imagine.  Open one of them with any text editor (was that really so difficult to figure out?) and you'll see what I mean.  The files have a left hand column for distance from the tower base and a right hand column for height relative to the tower base.  That's all ... no column headers, no restrictions on choice of distances, and no practical limit to the number of data pairs.  A brief sample of a terrain file showing a slight mound in front of a tower and then a gradual decline beyond that might look like this:

  0  150
  20  155
  50  160
  100  165
  200  165
  300  165
  400  160
  500  155
  1000  150
  2000  145
  3000  140
  etc

  If you have the patience you can draw a line on Google Earth and manually pick the numbers directly from that to load into any text editor.  A bit tedious, but simple and effective.  I've done it myself, although I generally find it quicker to manually pull the numbers from the terrain profile that DeLorme's 3D Topo software generates.  I've used HFTA a lot, both for my QTH and for a few friends, and I've never used Microdem.  I don't bother to generate files every five degrees azimuth or anything like that.   I just pick the key locations I want to hit (Europe, Japan, Central Asia, South America, Central Africa, etc) and even in the mountainous terrain around my QTH about six or eight terrain files suffice to tell me what I want to know.

  Dave   AB7E





  On 3/4/2012 2:01 AM, Mark Robinson wrote: 
I think that it would be pointless running the program on flat ground. 
No-one has ever been able to help me run the program with real data even 
though they offered to try, so I just had to guess when putting up my tower. 
It seems to me that this program is overrated and a waste of time since very 
people can actually make it work. Finding the coordinates of my tower is the 
easy part.

Sorry for the rant but I am so frustrated with this program and the lack of 
any useful instructions on how to use it.  Another half baked good idea in 
my book.. I put my beam at 87 1/2 feet and just worked DX.

Mark N1UK


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Gilbert" <xdavid at cis-broadband.com>
To: <towertalk at contesting.com>
Sent: Saturday, 03 March, 2012 10:18 PM
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Where to get HFTA Software


I think that may be a bit of an exaggeration, especially since as others
have pointed out here you're not really certain where "ground" is anyway
... certainly not within inches and probably not within several feet in
many locations.

Dave   AB7E




On 3/3/2012 7:48 PM, dotravel at aol.com wrote:

Note that unless the site is on flat ground just entering the QTH 
location would not be enough. For the data to be of value,  the location 
of the tower needs to be within feet if not inches prior to importing 
into HFTA.

Regards, John NA6L

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