art wrote:
I am more than a little
dismayed that the owner of 4NEC2 is not cooperating. He asked what AO
provided but now refuses to provide what
his program provides, thus I have a sneaking suspicion that all he did
was convert AO and AOP from DOS to WINDOWS without checking content
such that the contended bug or supposed error has carried thru today
without review.

Uhh.. I think Arie is doing what he can. Have YOU downloaded 4nec2 and
taken the time to learn how to use it and loaded your model in and run
it? It's your design, and YOU should put the work into verifying it.
Sure, you might have to figure out how to convert your conceptual design
into a format amenable for 4nec2 (or EZNEC or any of the other
modeling/optimizing codes). But this is something that any antenna
designer has to do. The program is just a tool. You have to invest the
effort in effectively using the tool, or deciding whether it's an
appropriate tool to use for answering YOUR questions.

It's not like Arie should do this as a demo, just to convince you to
download a FREE program. If you were a large company that was
contemplating spending $60K on a big modeling code, it might be
reasonable to ask the vendor of the code to run a sample model to see if
you've got a handle on the interfaces, etc. But the vendor's work in
that case fits in the category of "marketing expenses".

And, it's not real clear what the question is that you expect to have
answered by 4nec2 or AO, or whatever.


As far as the source of what Arie has done... I have NO first hand
knowledge other than observing the changes it's gone through over the
years. I'm pretty sure it does NOT use the same optimizers or
optimization method as AO. For that matter, his optimizers have evolved
over the years as new optimization algorithms come along.

And, on a more philosophical note.. it's pretty darn offensive to allege
that Arie's merely copied someone else's work, especially since Brian's
codes haven't ever been published as source code, to my knowledge.
Arie's put a lot of work into this, and is being quite gracious in
giving to us to use for free.