Antenna modeling software
 

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

Antenna modeling software
 

On Apr 27, 11:51�am, wrote:
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.

I haven't heard of MMANA before but I've used Roy Lewallen's EZNEC
and the trial version of NEC-Win by Nitanny Scientific. The latter
two
are about as overwhelming as one can get, I think. :-)

73, Len AF6AY

Antenna modeling software
 

On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:51:42 EDT, wrote in . 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.

I use EZNEC+,and quite like it. It lets me do a few things that the
free version won't, such as build helical models easily. The number
of segments per model in the free version is only 20, IIRC, where my
purchased version lets me have either 500 or 1500. The differences in
the results are quite small for every model I've built, whether I use
a large number of segments or a smaller number.

I'd like to hear about MMANA and NEC-Win Pro.

--
Mike Andrews, W5EGO

Tired old sysadmin

Antenna modeling software
 

Look into 4NEC2. It is free. I believe to a large extent, the differences in
the programs are the way you input antenna parameters and the way the results
are displayed but the output is the same because they use the same calculating
engine.
4NEC2 come with a bunch of antennas already modeled that you can play with to
get familiar with the program. I have made many models of antennas myself,
and getting quite a collection of antennas that are of interest to me. I
don't know about the other programs but I can tell you that I have spent
dozens of hours learning and experimenting with my 4NEC2 and still have a lot
to learn but when I finally learned about "cards" (from reading the generic
documentation) then things began to make a lot of sense.
It even has 3D displays but I haven't gotten that far yet !!

Rick K2XT

Antenna modeling software
 

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