During my working life I have developed a sceptisim of modelling. In my experience they tend to be considered a success when you get to about 60% accuracy. For this reason alone I've shyed away from antenna modelling but curiousity got hte better of me and I downloaded a copy of EZNEC. Whilst in sceptic mode I decided that the reason for doing this was to get comparitive figures for any of the home built antennas I've made, including my quite successful Cobwebb and not so successful 6m vertical which still causes me a headache just thinking about it.
The main reason is to model the antennas before hand and then determine if they meet my requirements, which at present is about a 90% : 10% split in being portable as opposed to in the shack. I've had a lot of enjoyment out of using 2m FM on WOTA outings and would like to have a go at some other bands using my own gear. Last friday's activation of Low Fell left be feeling quite low about my wonder whip that I used with my FT817. It barely managed to hit Cockermouth on 6m whilst 2m FM was doing a much better job.
So in order to broaden my outlook EZNEC is currently being digested. Once you get you head round the basic functions its not too hard to work out although the manual is a lot too wordy for my liking. I'm much more of a visual learner so a load of words fill me with dread. I'm sure that it wont be used every day but nice to have learnt some of the basic workings just in case.
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