W1HBQ wrote:

I'm planning to buy a new computer, and its main task will be for
antenna simulations using NEC. The issues appear to be: Intel verses
AMD, single verses dual core, front side bus and RAM speed, and of
course processor speed. I would appreciate any guidance.

It would be interesting to compare computation speeds of various
computers for the same antenna. One possible antenna to use for
comparison is The Grid Yagi from my website:
http://home.comcast.net/~ross_anderson/GridYagi.htm
http://home.comcast.net/~ross_anderson/GridYagiD1.htm
My three year old Dell with a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with HT and 3GB DDR of
RAM at 400MHz using the Nec2dXS*.exe calculating machine gives:
- - - MATRIX TIMING - - -FILL= 12.469 SEC., FACTOR= 11.422 SEC.
I'm interested to see how this compares to more modern computers.

Ross W1HBQ


Most of the antenna work I have done was with 20 - 40 MHz 386 class
processors using YO, AO, AOPro. The speed is not really needed so much
as an understanding of what is happening and a guiding hand that knows
how to tweak the optinization if that's what you are doing.

My longest run was about a month with a 20MHz 80386 plus coprocesser on
a wasted effort to make a 2/220/432 interlaced beam with regular
(parallel) elements. Not really possible to do well that way, but can
be done another way after you know how. Which I did not learn, of
course, for another 15 years. hihi

The faster processors, when optimizing, are actually a pain, as the
optimization often runs away before you can pause and tweak it.

tom
K0TAR