I got interested in this topic a couple of months ago, when I started thinking about getting some 160m capability. It’s just a difficult thing to get a long-enough wire high-enough into the air on my property. An STL is an appealing idea, even though there are some known compromises. Typically, I go through four phases when learning/doing something new:
- study (read as much as I can find, separating the valid from the “folktales”….there is amazing amount of incorrect folklore in the ham world)
- analysis (create a worksheet, usually using Mathcad, as it’s second nature to me).
- design / simulate (looking carefully at the results vs. what the analysis predicted….correcting the analysis or improving the detail level in the simulation, as necessary, until I feel the results are solid)
- build something if it looks worthwhile
Anyway, back when I was working for a living, I liked to encapsulate my analyses by converting to the Python environment (i.e. Python, numpy, Matplotlib, pyside) and distribute to other engineers. I wanted to do this in a new way for the magloop analysis that I did, so I’ve started to learn the HTML, CSS, JavaScript approach for creating web-based applications. The advantages are clear:
- automatically cross-platform (any modern browser will do, and on any OS)
- no worries about the screen resolution of the user PC
- updates are automatically seen by all
- most people are comfortable by now with the idioms used in modern browsers
Please check out the result. Go to the “calculators” menu item above and try it out. Comments are welcome: d dot clementi at ieee dot org