zap Posted March 20, 2016 Report Share Posted March 20, 2016 Using those basic line of sight calculations is rather useless for coloroado as the terrain comes into play. I actually was looking at a site that though it was the highest spot for miles, it was in a valley an hour or so south of the OP and would cover the county entirely, but only 10 miles west, 10 miles east, and 15 north due to mountains and the gorge the Arkansas River cut its way through. The basic calculations work well in this kind of terrain. https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/20160320/448d567f980191559ddc4e964f70b5ed.jpgThat grain elevator is 8 miles away and roughly 200 feet tall. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk coryb27 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WQWG565 Posted March 20, 2016 Author Report Share Posted March 20, 2016 Yeah, I get that the results may vairy when it comes to the mountain country big you look at I-70 MM 37 on the map, and MM46 on the map, there is a canyon between them. Even with this canyon, there is a clear transmission betwee the repeater and the 40watt radio in my truck. You can't see the repeater location at all, but at 50 watts of output, the repeater is perfect. The dips and hills in the area make it more difficult to properly calculate range. Driving around and pinging the repeater works best in the mountains Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
n4gix Posted March 20, 2016 Report Share Posted March 20, 2016 One would not use simple LOS alone, but when combined with the predictive model such as used by the Radio Mobile Online website, it is very useful. Note that RMO's calculations include topographical data, which is one reason why it might take up to two hours to plot a coverage map at the highest resolution! Just for fun, I plotted a hypothetical system based in Asheville, NC where I used to live. The surrounding hills created a lot of "shadows" that mostly blocked coverage until the antenna height approached 500' AGL. Professionals use much more sophisticated software when doing site surveys of course, but for us relative "amateurs" sites such as Radio Mobile Online are about as good as we have available. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zap Posted March 20, 2016 Report Share Posted March 20, 2016 One would not use simple LOS alone, but when combined with the predictive model such as used by the Radio Mobile Online website, it is very useful. Note that RMO's calculations include topographical data, which is one reason why it might take up to two hours to plot a coverage map at the highest resolution! Just for fun, I plotted a hypothetical system based in Asheville, NC where I used to live. The surrounding hills created a lot of "shadows" that mostly blocked coverage until the antenna height approached 500' AGL. Professionals use much more sophisticated software when doing site surveys of course, but for us relative "amateurs" sites such as Radio Mobile Online are about as good as we have available. I used a command line based program called Splat!. I never was a fan of RMO. Now my favorite is SignalPro, which runs roughly $10,000 for the license unfkrtunately. Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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