4NEC2 Antenna Modeling Software

[K3AN]

Does anyone here have experience using this free antenna modeling program? What do you think of it?

[N2KIN]

I tried it at one of my friend's house...it looks like to be a very powerful program to model antennas an dgives projections of your signal, but takes great effort to understand and get a hold of it...hihi

[KC2ELS]

4NEC2 has a *huge* learning curve, for lots of reasons.

The first and biggest one is that the code was written long ago in FORTRAN.  Data files were designed for punch cards (I'm not kidding) with a very unfriendly interface which has zero tolerance for errors.  Data output is... a bunch of numbers.  Great for hardcore engineers, I guess, but it doesn't mean much to me.

http://www.qsl.net/wb6tpu/swindex.html is an excellent archive of NEC-related code.  You should find some GUI frontends that may work for you, and someone's even ported the code to C which makes it easier to build.

[4NEC2]

Not quite,

4nec2 is a GUI front-end for the original Fortran based Nec2 core.

See www.qsl.net/wb6tpu/swindex.html for some picures.

p.s. You could use 'Geometry edit' (See Help) to create a model without having to know about the Nec2 syntax.

Success,
Arie.  
       

[KB3LME]

Great software package ... especially 4nec2x with the 3D display capability. I'm fairly new to modeling antennas, but with a little practice, I'm becoming quite proficient at using this execellent tool.

You can not go wrong by using it. Like anything, it just takes a little practice at getting used to it.

And amazingly ... the tool is absolutely free.