Thesis Prospectus
By Trip Ericson on Tuesday, July 20 2010, 15:07 - Site Updates - Permalink
As many people know, I am a student at UVA, and when the fall semester begins I will be entering my final year. At the University of Virginia, all engineering students are required to complete a fourth year thesis project, which I have now begun. My project will focus on the study of VHF antennas and reception, and yesterday I got my graded prospectus back. I received an A for it, and plan on doing the experimentation some time during the upcoming semester.
So if you are interested, you may read my Thesis Prospectus.
Comments
I have only skimmed it so far but this looks like a ``must read'' for tonight. Looks like my Phillip Roth novel gets trumped by this for the evening. :-)
In addition to its academic value, it appears that this study of VHF antennas, transmission and reception will have applicability to the real world. Had the study been done years ago, the notion of hi-VHF being ``prime real estate'' for DTV would have been challenged before the nightmares became real.
Good job! Engineering! People! The Federal Government! Can't wait for the "sequel"!!!
Looks interesting.
I just ran a coax from my attic to my bedroom for antennas.
I've bascially abandoned using the FM Dipole for VHF (WPVI Channel 6 in Philadelphia, PA). It only works some of the time.
Right, now I have a UHF loop positioned at an angle such that I can receive WMGM (36/40) with a transmitter near Wildwood, NJ and the Philadelphia stations. WPHL (17/17) doesn't alway come in. I'm thinking that I need a bigger loop. Indoor UHF loops were designed for Channels 14-83. A bigger loop for Channels 14-51 may be better. I'll let you know if I have better results.
Should be some interesting reading, good work Trip!
Very well done. Can't wait to see what you come up with.
I used to make my own half-wave dipole antennas cut for specific channel numbers. It worked pretty well. I've thought you could make an indoor antenna with a series of these for low vhf, high vhf, low uhf and high uhf all stacked on the same stand in kind of a v shape and get better reception than the standard rabbit ears. You could set it up so you could tune the antenna depending on what station you were watching, or use them all at once.
I finally read the prospectus thoroughly.
This will be a fascinating study and I can't wait to see the final paper. Maybe Trip will find a remedy for the problematical VHF band.
Just a couple of points:
1). A citation of Hart 2010'' occurs in the main body but isn't found in the References'' portion. Where can a layman get access to Hart's work?
2). Until reading this paper, I wasn't aware of the 1999 Sgrignoli study of channel 6 in Charlotte. Was there a similar study of high-VHF performed that far back in time?
It's noteworthy that indoor antenna testing wasn't done in the Charlotte case.
Whoops! I'm glad my professor didn't catch the fact that my paper lacked Hart! =)
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/Fil...
That's where I got it from, hopefully you can open it.
Your submission may have been hart-less but it had plenty of brain. Heh, heh, heh.
Meta: Can you modify the blog submission backend so that backticks (aka accent grave characters) are allowed. I think PHP may omit them unless some escaping is done.
The 1999 Sgrignoli study cited in Trip's prospectus is VERY interesting. Gary Sgrignoli was the Staff Consulting Engineer for Zenith.
One statement gives me pause (and its based upon testing a channel 6 DTV facility in Charlotte with 620 watts at 1307' HAAT:
"While more testing is required on low VHF channels to study the effectiveness of this frequency
band for DTV, the test results in Charlotte are very encouraging."