On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 12:38:25 -0700, Roy Lewallen
wrote:
Having no Windows system must be quite a handicap. It certainly limits
the amount of software available to use.

It depends upon what you want to do. I have not found it to be too
big of a limitation for what I do, and I have been using linux since
1992. I have also been an active supporter of open software for many
years (see http://www.jedsoft.org) and I have managed to code around
what I perceive as gaps.

For the antenna modeling, I use a slang script
(http://www.jedsoft.org/slang/) to search the parameter space for a
specified antenna geometry by minimizing a statistic. The slang
script runs nec and then runs a hacked version of xnecview to get the
gain and SWR as a function of frequency, and from that information
computes the statistic.

--John