"And what have you good folks at ARRL been working on lately to top the last edition of The ARRL Antenna Book?"

My friends are fond of needling me on this subject, since they know just how much fun I (as editor) have working on the Antenna Book! Three years ago in QST I described how the 18^th Edition broke a lot of new ground, since about 25% of that book had been updated from the previous edition.

The new 19^th Edition represents an even more ambitious enterprise--we've rewritten about 40% of the material from the last edition. And, yes, just in case you're wondering, I'm every bit as enthusiastic and thrilled with this new edition as with the last.

A Modern Look

The first thing you'll notice about the new 19^th Edition is that we've modernized "the look." Both the text itself and the spacing between lines are slightly larger, making it a little easier on old eyes like mine. Such cosmetic touches are nice, of course, but we haven't forgotten that it's content that counts. For this new edition we've benefited greatly from the hard work and analytical powers of some well-known authors:

• Kurt Andress, K7NV, thoroughly rewrote the Antenna Supports chapter. You will find detailed information on how to evaluate your tower situation to make sure it stays up. Plus, there's a lot more discussion of how to get that monster antenna safely up your tower.
• L. B. Cebik, W4RNL, rewrote from the bottom up the Log Periodic Arrays chapter, pointing out the need oftentimes for optimizing an LPDA beyond the original design equations. Some old performance claims are debunked as well.
• Rudy Severns, N6LF, rewrote much of the section in the Multielement Arrays chapter dealing with broadside and end-fire arrays. Rudy reevaluates the Bruce array, an old design, using modern modeling techniques to find that it has some very desirable qualities. Low-band operators take heed.
• Dean Straw, N6BV, modernized the Multiband Antennas, Quad Array and Long-Wire and Traveling Wave chapters, bringing to bear the power of computer modeling to reassess the performance of these antennas. You might be surprised.
• Frank Witt, AI1H, thoroughly rewrote the Broadband Antennas chapter, tying together in one place about 15 years of his unparalled experience in this subject.

In addition, four other chapter saw less-extensive, but still substantial changes, additions and updates. This includes the chapters on Loop Antennas, Direction-Finding Antennas, Radio Wave Propagation and Coupling the Transmitter to the Line.

Modern Software

Every once in a while some old curmudgeon will corner me at a convention and complain vehemently about how our books have managed to dumb down the whole hobby. My reply is first to ask him when he last actually looked at an ARRL book. Then I'll open up one of the latest books to show that it can hardly be called "dumbed down." The technical information in modern ARRL books is a lot more sophisticated and complex than even as recently as a decade ago.

It used to be that professional engineers didn't pay much attention to books written for amateurs. Indeed, for many years ARRL staffers worried that publications containing too much math might scare hams away. Nowadays, some say that the pendulum might have swung too far the other way. Now we have books that are chock-a-block full of equations!

Certainly not all hams are engineers or mathematicians, but many hams are perfectly comfortable with higher math. So we have tried to present the complete story--equations and all--with plain-English explanations of the physical background behind the equations.

And for those of us who are a bit nervous confronting a hyperbolic sine function face-to-face, we've incorporated many of these kinds of hairy equations into software designed to be educational--and even fun to use. By playing with the software, you can gain considerable insight into how something like a Yagi or a transmission line or an LPDA really does work.

As editor of The ARRL Antenna Book now for the last three editions, I've had many hams say to me that this balanced approach to complex technical subjects makes good sense to them. For those who want all the gory technical details, there are indeed details (and math) abounding. For those who want intuitive explanations, there are plenty of those too.

In each of the last two editions, we secured a floppy disk onto the inside back cover. Frankly, that made a rather funny looking bulge in the book. In the back of the 19^th Edition of The ARRL Antenna Book we are now bundling a CD-ROM, containing a wealth of software and data files. The new CD-ROM certainly fits much better in the back of the book, and it also gives us a huge amount of disk space in which to give you more modern software and much more data.

I've been a confirmed DOS-aholic for years, more comfortable with a DOS prompt than with a mouse and GUI. But it's hard to deny the power and user-friendliness of modern Windows software. So I challenged myself to get modern by learning Visual Basic 6 and Visual Fortran 6. Yes, dear readers, I'm still programming in Fortran, because of the power and ability it has dealing with complex mathematics.

Here's what's included on the new CD-ROM for the 19^th Edition:

• YW, standing for "Yagi for Windows." This program analyzes Yagis and displays gain, front-to-rear ratio (or front-to-back) and SWR over a range of frequencies you specify. You can design Gamma or Hairpin matches using the 82 optimized Yagi designs that we include. These range from two elements on 40meters to 40elements on 70 cm!

• Scale is a DOS program where you can "scale" a Yagi design (such as the 82 designs above) to different frequencies, different taper schedules or to create input files for different analysis programs, such as NEC.
• TLW, short for "Transmission Line Program for Windows." This is a considerable upgrade of the TLA program ("Transmission Line, Advanced") included with the 18^th Edition. You can analyze 32 standard types of coax or open-wire transmission lines, or you can "design your own" transmission line to analyze. With TLW you can fully evaluate a variety of antenna tuner configurations, including their losses and breakdown points. The "Swiss Army Knife" of transmission-line programs just took a big step forward.

• YT ("Yagi Terrain Analysis") is a DOS program that analyzes the effect of your own local terrain on the launch of HF signals into the ionosphere. We include 77 elevation-statistic files that cover geographical locations all around the world so you can compare your elevation patterns to what are statistically needed to ensure communication.
• AAT ("Analyze Antenna Tuner") is a DOS program that automatically computes the matching capabilities for various antenna tuner configurations, given real-world tuning components you want to use in them.
• Mobile is a terrific DOS-based program by Leon Braskamp, AA6GL, that does comprehensive analyses of mobile whip antennas with loading coils.
• Gamma is a simple DOS program that computes gamma matches.
• LPCAD28 is a nifty DOS program by Roger Cox, WBØDGF, that designs Log Periodic Dipole Arrays.
• GeoClock is a truly wonderful Windows shareware program supplied by Joe Algren. This presents the world as a series of zoomable maps. It includes the day/night terminator and grayline information, plus the ability to determine range and bearing using your mouse from any location to another, worldwide.
• Active Beacon Wizard ++, supplied by Jim Tabor, KU5S, is another very nice Windows shareware program that shows the activity of the NCDXF HF beacon system. It also gathers detailed, real-time propagation reports from the Internet.
• MakeVOA is a DOS utility program that takes YT elevation-response data from your own terrain and tailors an antenna file for use in VOACAP to produce customized HF area-coverage maps.
• Summary Propagation Tables: There are summary propagation tables for 155 different locations around the world for all months of the year and all levels of solar activity. (This amounts to 72 tables for each of the 155 QTHs.) These are intuitively arranged by continent: 40 QTHs in the USA, 20 in other parts of North America, 22 in Europe, 23 in Asia, 23 in Africa, 14 in Oceania and 13 in South America. Planning a DXpedition somewhere? Now you have the propagation data you'll need.