Re: [IRCA] Google Earth as a DX aid

["Neil Kazaross" <neilkaz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris,,thx for the great tip which I made good use of today. My neighbor to 
the west gave me permission to run BOGs thru his woods behind his house and 
yard. However, trying to keep wire straight for hundreds of feet thru thick 
woods isn't easy during full foliage of everything including undergrowth. I 
can sort of see his house and tell where the end of his back lawn is and 
near the end of the wire, ditto for my more westerly neighbor, but with the 
arial view from google earth I wasn't sure how far to stay away from the 
edges of their lawns while keeping basically due west ..well 272 deg. 
Anyhow, I got the 335 ft down in his yard today in about 2 hours and have 
about 150 ft and less dense woods on my land to go thru and then 450 feet 
easy to hook up to my DX truck. Thus I expect to be trying a 935 ft BOG 
tomorrow night.

73 KAZ Barrington IL

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "CHRIS KNIGHT" <cgknight63@xxxxxxx>
To: <irca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 2:33 PM
Subject: [IRCA] Google Earth as a DX aid


> If you didn't already know this, Google Earth is a great tool for finding 
> DX sites, measuring the length of wire antennas, locating transmitter 
> sites, etc. To begin, I downloaded Google Earth (version 4.3.7284.39.16 
> beta). To find the website I searched for "google earth" (in quotes) from 
> the www.google.com home page.
>
> After Google Earth was installed, I located my old QTH (for example). (At 
> this point you may open Google Earth and follow along with me). The radio 
> room window was located exactly at 38 deg 18' 44.17"N 104 deg 42' 54.65"W 
> (on S. Clarion Dr.). From that point I had a BoG (sometimes elevated 2' or 
> 3' feet above ground) extending from the window to the corner of S. 
> Purcell Blvd. and S. Datura Drive. To find that location, click on "street 
> view" in "layers" at the bottom left. Street names will appear. There's a 
> house there now which didn't exist back in the 1980's.
>
> To measure the length of the Beverage antenna, click the ruler in the 
> toolbar. This brings up a small window entitled "Ruler". To choose the 
> preferred units of measure (feet, meters or other units of measure) simply 
> click the down arrow and select the units. Next, click off "mouse 
> navigation" to set your points of measurement. Click the point you wish to 
> measure from. If you need to navigate to a point off the screen for the 
> 2nd point, enable mouse navigation making sure to toggle it off again once 
> you find the 2nd point. Or, you can zoom out using the controls on the 
> right. For this example click on the old radio room window (at the receive 
> end of the antenna) at the above coordinates, then click the near the 
> intersection of the two above streets. The length of the antenna comes out 
> to be around 750 feet.
>
> If you want a view from ground level, click "street view" in the layers 
> section. You will notice camera symbols popping up all along the streets. 
> Click a camera symbol in the area. You can now see the house, the radio 
> room window and the trees near the house, also the bare prairie where the 
> antenna once lived.
>
> Once you find a potentially good DX QTH, click on the yellow thumbtack 
> symbol in the tool bar. You may now place a marker on the location, title 
> it, and make notes about that location. Once you have saved the placemark, 
> you may refer back to it by double-clicking the information that appears 
> in the "places section" on the left center of the screen. To edit a 
> placemark, right-click it then click "properties". I used this feature to 
> placemark all of my local and semi-local station transmitter sites, for 
> example, finding the coordinates from the FCC database.
>
> The resolution of satellite photos varies. In some areas (especially very 
> remote places) the resolution isn't as good as populated areas. Even so, 
> Google Earth is still an excellent tool and better yet, it's free!
>
> Does anyone have the coordinates for the famous Grayland DX site?...hi.
>
> 73. Chris
>
> Chris Knight
> Fort Lupton, Colorado
> http://sites.google.com/site/2008amloggings/

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