AmateurRadio.com

Today we have a little bit of fun ham-related tinkering from work.  This is two different frequencies transmitted from the same site.

There are lots of neat details in a ray-trace:  skip focusing, Pedersen rays, mode-splitting, …  One thing that’s fun about writing your own models is that you can modify (intentionally or not) the model physics to do unphysical things…

The second run shows X and O modes for a single frequency and a failed attempt at modeling an MF signal into an E-F region duct.  (The ducting, by the way, has nothing to do with my actual work.  I was simulating it for ham purposes, although it helped me uncover a problem.)  The signals do get to the duct, but they bend the wrong way.  This has been fixed in the code, but it serves to remind that modelers have complete control.  The background ionosphere is relatively unphysical in this one as well…

The raytrace code used above is small, simple, and written in MATLAB.  I doubt that it will ever be released publicly, but if so I will note it here on the blog.

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