On 7/29/2026 10:05 PM, [email protected] wrote:
I was taught an early age/high school (by Carl Smith Engineers,
That's starting at the top! Did you get to know or meet Carl? I was lucky to have a coop job (U. of Cincy) for part of a year in Pete Johnson's consulting office. You may know that Carl and Pete wrote the AM Technical Rules after WWII. Pete's consulting practice was designing arrays to fit new stations into an AM band that had been full for decades.
In the course of my EE studies at that time, I didn't have the background to learn how to design them, but I did learn the fundamental principles. When Pete had as design to test, he gathered a bunch of the available EE students around a big boardroom table, each of us with slide rules, math tables (for Bessel functions), and big accounting spreadsheets with 25-30 columns. Together, we cranked out the design for every five degrees of azimuth and five degrees of elevation.
Once that was done, I'd compute ground wave on using the family of ground conductivity curves in the Rules and plot them on aero charts.
I learned a LOT that summer! 73, Jim K9YC _________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector
