EXACTLY! We can't even do good modeling of the antenna situation becaus so much of the behavior of antennas is caused by interaction with the ground and that is something we don't know accurately for our models and the location and quality of the real ground keeps changing.
Oddly enough, if your planes were completely carbon fibre and were large compared to the wavelength of our radio gear we could get real good data from the work done to put antennas on the surface of military aircraft made of carbon fiber. Basically what we do is make a guess. Depending on the radio we have (does the antenna come off or collapse completely or still stick out some) the maker will suggest a minumum ground range. If they say minimum of 75' and we only get 10' then we know something is wrong and we need to fix it before flight. Even if we have 75' we don't know that we are OK or as good as we can be but it should be safe enough to start flight testing. How good is good enough? As long as you have full control of your plane it is good enough. OTOH Many people spend lots of time and money for a very small improvement in the plane on the chance it might help. Why not also spend a little time and money getting the radio installation as good as possible so the risk of a problem is reduced. The ground range check is really for two things. First is to see if our gear is safe to fly. Second is to see if something has changed. If you go week after week with 150' of ground range and one week it is only 75' then something has changed and needs to be fixed. michael N6CHV AMA 77292 On 2/19/06, Bill's Email <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So if I understand you correctly, a ground range test has little, if > any, correlation to airborne range. If it did, then there would be an > empirical formula that would allow me to relate the two. But what I see > you saying is that each installation is unique and therefore you cannot > provide a mathematical relationship due to an essentially infinite > number of variables. Essentially it is an equation with no solution. RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
