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Teaching area
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Every radar horizon, every comms range ring, every ESM cut you have ever trusted was drawn on an assumption about the air. Most of the time that assumption — a smooth, standard, gently thinning atmosphere — is close enough. Over water it is wrong often enough to matter, and when it is wrong it is not wrong by ten percent. It is wrong by a factor of five, in both directions at once: your radar sees a surface contact at 200 nautical miles and misses an aircraft at 40.
This teaching area explains the machinery behind that. It starts with why air bends radio waves at all, builds the two units (N and M) that let you see a duct on a plot, walks through how ducts form and where they live, and then opens up the tool itself: where the weather data comes from, how the parabolic equation turns a temperature-and-humidity profile into a coverage picture, and how detection, intercept and troposcatter ranges fall out of it.
It ends where every honest tactical decision aid should end — with a list of the things this one cannot see.
Who this is for. Information Warfare Officers, Enlisted Information Warfare Specialists, METOC forecasters and anybody who has to explain a propagation product to a watch team. You need algebra and a tolerance for logarithms. You do not need electromagnetics.
How to use it. Read straight through the first time — the lessons build. Each one ends with a Try it box giving a concrete experiment in the Explorer: a place, a frequency, an antenna height, and what you should expect to see. Doing them is most of the learning.