There is no doubt that Google is a powerful search engine. It handles and indexes enormous amount of data at any given moment. It is so powerful that sometimes provides access into information that we should not be able to get easily or for free.
Yesterday I decided to look-up some antenna modeling resources. I was interested mainly for information regarding the MININEC and NEC2 engines in depth (differences , capabilities, limitations etc). A simple Google search returned that the latest release of MININEC is 3.13. using “MININEC 3.13” as the search term returned two surprises!
The first one was a match inside a chapter of the ARRL Antenna Modeling Course book by L.B. Cebik, W4RNL which was accessible online without any restriction! It proved to be reading material for some online course which probably is not free itself. I can guess that there must be some permission from ARRL to use the chapter as reading material but in my opinion it should not be available to everyone as this possibly violates the copyrights of the author and publisher.
However, I was curious enough to see how much of the book was available, so I did another search using the search term “site:wm2.ctdlc.org/webmentor/courses/rds/search/” and voila! the whole book is available online for free! What a surprise!
The second surprise was that the next match in my initial search (“MININEC 3.13”) was a hit inside a chapter of Low Band DX-ing by ON4UN which is the latest (4th) edition ! By opening that pdf file, gives you access to all the chapters of the book, which means that you can get the whole book for free!
I could not stop! I grabbed my ARRL Antenna Book and ARRL Handbook and searched for a random chapter. Needless to say that are both available online (see here and here)!
No matter how much I dislike copyright infringement, I found this “breach of information” a great opportunity to read all the chapters and get the most I can about antenna modeling. I do not really care about the other three books because I already have them in their latest hard copy version (who hasn’t?).
Maybe you should do the same for as long as it is there…
73,SV3DJG
sv3djg's ham radio blog 