Bryan;

You are the second person to recommend Visio, one by a local ham
friend who is a network professional and ardent homebrewer. I went
to Visio site, and ended up looking at what I think is a plugin
called Electra 2005, which I think is some kind of enhancement
or such. It's a real bargain at $799.00.... he he...

I will install Visio tonight and give it a try too, can you point me
to additional symbol libraries for it or can you create your own?

Someone above (geek) sent me a .zip file with thousands of symbols
that
could possibly be imported. So far I have:

Smart Draw
Tiny Cad
Express SCH and Express PCB
Geek symbols for use with paint program

installed thanks to all your kind help.

Let the trials begin...

Jim







On Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:38:44 -0800, "Bryan"
wrote:

Jim wrote:
Can anyone recommend a simple schematic drawing CAD program, not one
of the "do everything" programs that draws living rooms and
skyscrapers, looking for a schematic-only program that does not have
too steep a learning curve, and doesn't cost too much or is freeware
or shareware that won't cost an arm or a leg.

What programs do you use and what are your likes/dislikes/wish list?

I'm trying to settle on something that I will probably only use
occasionally to draw schematics of homebrew projects to file away or
possibly submit for publication. Any suggestions appreciated.

I'm running Windows XP Pro.

Jim, WA5DXP

Hi Jim,

Along with the others mentioned, Eagle (http://www.cadsoftusa.com/) is a
schematic capture and PCB layout package that's free for personal use (with
some limitations). The learning curve might be a bit steep but the price is
right, and it'll produce photoplot files for your favorite PCB house.

For occaisional & simple drawing, you can also use Visio (comes with some
electronic symbols). For example, I drew this in Visio and "printed" it to
PDF:
http://www.geocities.com/bswadener/t...soft-start.pdf.

Bryan WA7PRC