It would help to know what you are trying to model.
The various packages have different strengths and weaknesses, and
can get wildly different results sometimes.

MMANA is based on Mini-NEC, is fast, pretty intuitive, and free.
But Mini-NEC has a lot of limitations when modeling some geometries.
Especially, the results of a ground mounted vertical antenna are totally
wrong (not a MMANA issue, but rather a miniNEC limitation). Since
it's free, you can play with it to get a feel for antenna modeling.

4NEC2 is a NEC2 based program. It has some nice user I/O features,
and is free, but the learning curve is (to me) a bit steeper than MMANA.
the NEC2 engine provides better accuracy that miniNEC in some cases.
The NEC2 engine suffers from significant ground-loss modeling issues.
4NEC2 allows using the NEC4 engine. You have to license NEC4 from
Lawrence Livermore Labs, but I think they have a low cost single-user
license now availaible ($250 if I recall correctly). The NEC4 engine is
a big upgrade to NEC2, and handles ground-losses a lot better. You can
model verticals and get something close to the right input impedance.

Many of the NEC2 based programs offer the ability to use NEC4 instead.

A lot of guys like Roy Lewellan's EZNEC software, and it gets consistently
good user feedback reports on the message boards. It's NEC2-based, but
the latest version offers NEC4 option.





wrote in message
ups.com...
I've been 'googling' for a MININEC-based antenna modeling program (or
programs) and I've decided a guy could get old and grey before he was
through looking at all the offerings. I've kind of (based on web page
descriptions) compiled a short list of candidates as follows:

MMANA by JH3HHT
EZNEC by W7EL
NEC-Win Pro by Nitanny Scientific

Is anyone here using any of those, especially NEC-Win Plus? Can
anyone recommend one that they KNOW is better than the ones on my
list? I have $450 budgeted for this but I might consider something a
little costlier if it were overwhelmingly better.

73, RDW