A study of the “slack-string” knife-edge diffraction model

When determining diffraction loss over irregular terrain, there is always an engineering tradeoff between the accuracy of the diffraction models' predictions and the computational complexity of the models. This paper presents the results of an investigation of a multiple knife-edge diffraction model, the ldquoslack-stringrdquo model. The model is tested here using a subset of a database of knife-edge profiles designed for comparative analysis of different diffraction models' predictive accuracies. The results of the ldquoslack-stringrdquo model are shown against the results of the other knifeedge diffraction models.