Why Going Back to Basics Fixed My RF Field Map — Quarter-Wave Vertical Antenna Test

This weekend I went back to basics — literally.

I stripped all the buildings out of my RF field CesiumJS mapping model to see what a quarter-wave vertical antenna really looks like when nothing else is in the way. The idea was to test whether the simplest version of the model still matched what the math predicts.
👉Link to new model code in first comment.

At first, it didn’t.
Most of the data points disappeared (it turned out I was overwriting their IDs), and when they came back, the field strength was wrong — strongest at ground level instead of rolling off. That’s when GPT-5 and I realized the ground reflection model wasn’t being applied the way I thought it was.

Once we fixed those, the results finally looked right:

A deep null at the base

A clean roll-off toward vertical

And a uniform pattern like a proper quarter-wave radiator

The lesson?
When a model — or any system — starts doing weird things, strip it down to the most basic version and check if that still works. That’s where the truth usually hides.

Next up: adding buildings back in one by one to see how they distort that perfect uniform field. Stay tuned for the next experiment in the RF Field Mapping Project.

#RFEngineering #HamRadio #PropagationModeling #AIinEngineering #DebuggingMindset #FieldMapping #VerticalAntenna #CopaseticFlow

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