Designing an Amateur Radio Antenna Installation using a Tailored Commercial System Engineering Process
Stephen P. Johnson, D.Sc. N2FT
When I moved into my current home twenty years ago in a community with a homeowner association (HOA), I knew that setting up an effective antenna system that would not arouse the ire of the architecture review board would be a challenge. I operated mobile on VHF and HF for many years and operated a low “inverted vee” in the backyard for a while, but convenience and performance were lacking. I primarily wanted to operate HF DX contests from home and make reasonable numbers of contacts.
In my job as a professional system engineer and systems architect with the Raytheon Company (now retired), I was periodically called upon to help envision and design complex systems to meet challenging customer requirements. My company has developed and comprehensively applies a thorough systems engineering process defined by an Integrated Product Development System – a collection of business processes and tools that Raytheon uses throughout the product lifecycle. This system is applied to the complex task of satisfying customer needs with optimized system designs.
Faced with the need for a custom antenna system for my home amateur station, I decided to leverage my professional systems engineering background and apply some of the engineering analysis and design techniques I have used at work to design an antenna system that would be reasonably low profile yet provide adequate performance. Although this antenna design may provide the basis for others to build similar antenna systems through replication or adaptation, the primary thrust of this article is to present a simplified system engineering approach and the problem solving techniques I used so the reader can understand the overall thought process and then apply similar methods to solve their own amateur radio system design problems. It should be noted that I am not a professional RF engineer, so I approach this job with the RF technical skills of a typical technically-oriented amateur operator.
Please see Stephen’s full article – Designing an Amateur Radio Antenna Installation using a Tailored Commercial System Engineering Process