Electromagnetic visualisation for communications training

An adequate understanding of the performance of antennas and how they interact with their surroundings is essential to obtaining the best performance from communications assets. Defence and other communications personnel who are responsible for the choice, configuration and orientation of antennas, and/or frequency management, rely on this knowledge for the daily performance of their duties. The HMAS Cerberus radio frequency management course regularly delivers such training to a wide range of students, both from Australasia and South East Asia. Students are drawn from a wide range of academic backgrounds, and may not have English as a first language. Because of this, the teaching of underlying concepts needs to be addressed with a minimum of detailed mathematics. A wide range of image-based training material privately developed by the author is currently being adapted to support such training. The paper discusses some of this material.