[TowerTalk] Choke on feed point of dipole

[Jim Brown]

On 1/15/2026 4:23 AM, Brian Beezley wrote:
> I've thought about what it might take to make radiation pattern 
> measurements over complex terrain with a drone. But it's a complicated 
> problem with many hidden sources of error. When I was considering this, 
> each day I'd wake up with a new source of error that hadn't occurred to 
> me the day before. I think it would be easy to get in over your head 
> without ever knowing it. A computer program validated with fishy data is 
> not worth anyone's attention. 

I'm a strong believer in never letting the perfect be the enemy of the 
good. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. The 
early explorers, Columbus and others, didn't have a clue when they set 
sail, but here we are.

When I was modeling my terrain in 2006, The first time I used HFTA, I 
ran one radial taking data off of a terrain map, point by point, 
building a data file. Dean advised me to take the data farther and at 
smaller intervals, knowing my terrain. Advances in the state of the art 
is never the result of throwing up our hands.

Like many here, I've been doing this stuff for a while. As a co-op EE 
student at U of Cincy, I had a gig in the office of Pete Johnson's 
consulting biz, which specialized designing arrays to fit new stations 
into the AM band that had been full for 20 years. A bunch of us sat 
around a boardroom table with 20+ column paper spreadsheets, slide 
rules, and Bessel function tables computing every five degrees of az and 
elevation. The next week, I'd plot field strength for radials from FCC 
ground data. To get 10kW daytime for his own station on 680 kHz, he ran 
radials in the direction of WLW on 700 kHz to improve on that data, and 
eventually got the license.

Pete and Carl Smith (better known for CREI) wrote the AM technical Rules 
after WWII. I learned a lot from that gig.

73, Jim K9YC