[K3CAL] Terrain Profiles for HFTA

[N3AE]

CARA Members, 

Some of you may be familiar with the High Frequency Terrain Analysis (HFTA) program that comes with the ARRL Antenna Book CDROM. HFTA allows you to find out how your local terrain affects the takeoff angle of your horizontally polarized HF antenna along a given heading. Lower takeoff angles are better for DX. 

A stumbling block for using HFTA is that you have to get the terrain data for your exact location and then put it into radial elevation profile files for HFTA to use. This involves finding a source of digital elevation data on the web, sometimes "merging" data that crosses over map edge boundaries, and running a free but fairly complex program called MicroDEM to generate the radial profile files. 

Stu, K6UT, has developed a web-based process to automate all of this. All you have to do is enter the latitude and longitude of your antenna and you get an email with all the radial terrain profile files attached, ready for use by HFTA. 

Here's a link to the info on Stu's project. 

https://community.flexradio.com/flexradio/topics/hfta-terrain-files-automated-at-last 


Here's the link to Stu's web site. The HFTA data access application link is towards the bottom. 

http://k6tu.net/ 


73 

Shawn 
N3AE 



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