Anita Longley´s Legacy: The Longley-Rice Model - Still Going Strong After Almost 50 Years [Historical Corner]

At the dawn of the computer age, Anita Longley, Phil Rice, and their colleagues at the Central Radio Propagation Laboratory (CRPL) (now the Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS)) realized that the computational capabilities of the new machines could result in vast improvements of the modeling - and design - of radio systems used by the military and the public in a wide array of applications. The necessity for propagation modeling became evident during World War II, as it was vital for pilots to have reliable communications systems. I In the late 1960s, when the Longley-Rice model was developed, land mobile radio and television systems required better engineering than had been available up to that point in time [1]. Marrying an empirical model (based on electromagnetic theory) with measured data (terrain features and radio measurements) provided that better engineering, and resulted in algorithms still in wide use today.