from Hacker News

U.S. Marine Corps Antenna Handbook (1999) [pdf]

by joos3 on 7/29/23, 6:11 AM with 87 comments

• by squarefoot on 7/29/23, 8:24 AM

  Also worth mentioning, the US Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS), plus other interesting documentation one can find from the top menu here.

  https://maritime.org/doc/#neets

• by antegamisou on 7/29/23, 1:03 PM

  For those with some fundamental undergrad math background, check out the gold standard book on antennas

      Antenna Theory: Analysis and Design, Constantine Balanis
  

  https://www.amazon.com/Antenna-Theory-Analysis-Constantine-B...

• by teeray on 7/29/23, 1:36 PM

  The ARRL antenna book is also worth your while: https://www.arrl.org/arrl-antenna-book

• by stall84 on 7/29/23, 2:28 PM

  Say what you will about American militarism... but the branches put out some exceptionally thorough, clear, and practical training documents... in most cases. (Same goes for the FAA from personal experience)

• by diracs_stache on 7/29/23, 9:04 PM

  During my time in the Navy doing radio comms and intelligence, I quickly learned a mastery of Maxwells equations, information theory, Fourier series etc. was much less important than learning and applying practical knowledge from manuals like this. For the folks discussing transmission lines I think the telegraphers equation is a useful tool.

• by 8bitsrule on 7/29/23, 8:32 AM

  I liked to play with longwires (sect. 4-22) back in the day ... the longer, the more directional they get. Fun to experiment with (back when copperweld was cheap). But when I did eventually wind up living on a farmstead for a couple of years, I didn't have the time (or the nearby trees) to try out really really long wires.

• by nunez on 7/29/23, 12:16 PM

  This is really well written and surprisingly accessible! I know nothing about communication systems but was able to read this pretty easily.

• by kepler1 on 7/29/23, 4:49 PM

  Two observations, one mundane, one serious.

  Funny how even in reference textbooks on radio/EM/etc, for some reason people cannot help but use half circles on a plot about a sine function, instead of the proper function shape. Don't know why that is! See Figure 1-2.

  And more seriously, I think that all of our useful military education texts date from pre-1990s, when the military was one part an able research and development (and educational) and contracting institution. Now today most all of that capability has been outsourced to the military contractors and anyone who could write such a text (or properly design an aircraft on the military side) has long left.

• by nier on 7/30/23, 2:14 AM

  Reminds me, the other day I came upon this article that was written about military planes using 5 mile long antennas to communicate with submarines.

  https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31477/heres-why-an-e-6...

• by ulnarkressty on 7/29/23, 8:14 AM

  I find these guides a bit disappointing in that they always give the example of a wire loop generating an EM field, which one could sort of imagine given day to day experience with direct current and conductors. However this all breaks down when looking at regular monopole antennas - how can the conductor conduct when one of the ends is just hanging in the air? AC magic I suppose.

  Similarly they are very short on details on what exactly is going on when the EM field is generated. I guess it consists of photons, but where exactly do they come from and how are they generated using (in some cases) only milliwatts of power?

• by entropicgravity on 7/29/23, 6:52 PM

  Ya but what's that 'f' (or lamba) term doing in the path loss equation? I'm pretty sure Einstein or Feynman would cast a jaundiced eye at that.

• by stall84 on 7/29/23, 2:21 PM

  radio is probably one of my all time fav concepts. thanks for this

• by aaron695 on 7/29/23, 10:06 AM

  There is a MCRP 8-10B.11 (Formerly MCRP 3-40.3C) (2016) but running a diff the text is exactly the same except the first title pages -

  https://w5sc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/MCRP-8-10B.11.pd...

  It's hard to believe nothing has changed in 20 years, we've move on a lot passed 1999 aka pre-internet society.

• by leroy_masochist on 7/29/23, 12:34 PM

  Pretty surreal to see this trending on HN!

  "The NVIS loop: so easy, a marine could do it"