[HCARC] Computer Programs

[Kerry Sandstrom]

Hi Gang,

I don't know if any one is interested in new/old computer programs.  There is actually a very large number of excellent professional programs out there that were written by/for the US government.  The beauty of these US Government programs are thye are well documented, run well, and are free.  That's free without quotation marks!  As tavpayers, we have already paid for them.  Two of them with extensive ham radio applications are the ITS HF Propagation suite which includes VOACAP and NEC.  VOACAP is the descendant of the manual procedure used by US government agencies since the 40's.  Virtually all the commercial propagation programs for sale to hams are based on VOACAP.  What you are paying for is the fancy GUI (Graphic User Interface) when you buy one of them.  I've shown various VOACAP outputs at past club meetings and find them to be all I need.  I've run VOACAP on everything from an Windows 95 machine to a Vista machine.  The second one is NEC, the numerical Electromagnetic Code.  Its development has been funded by the Army, Navy, and AF labs and the DOE National labs, primarily, Lawrence Livermore National Lab.  Its based on the Method of Moments techniques developed at Syracuse University.  A free (again no quotes) GUI called 4NEC2 is available on the internet.  I've had no problems running it on XP and Vista machines.  Its still in use by the government which has not released the latest version, NEC4.  NEC2 is quite adequate unless you're interested in buried antennas.  Both these codes really began development in the 60's and were designed to be run on main frame computers.  Now, we have main frame computer capabilities in run of the mill pc's and laptops.  If you see a commercial antenna program being sold to amateurs, its almost certainly based on NEC and what you are paying for is the GUI.  4NEC2 is a perfectly adequate GUI.

There is another source of some very good free software of a slightly different type.  One that I have been using for a while now is called GNU77 FORTRAN.  It is similar to FORTRAN 77.  MY old FORTRAN compilers won't run on VISTA or newer operating systems so I had been looking for a newer FORTRAN compiler that is compatible with Vista and WINDOWS 7.  This is it.  I've successfully compiled and run several old FORTRAN programs and have been quite happy with it.  Places where these programs are often available are in late 80's and 90's textbooks such as Antennas by Balinis as well as various league publications.  The're great programs if you can run them and now I can again.  

BASIC is a similar situation.  BASIC used to come with many early home computers such as Atari 800, TRS 80, Color Computer, early IBM PC's, and was include with Windows, at least through Windows 98.  Its not any more and no, Visual Basic doesn't seem to resemble the BASIC I learned.  One of the companies sells a professional version of BASIC called Liberty Basic.  It costs $49.95 (Hardly a professional price!).  What is of more interest is they also have a free junior version called Just Basic available on the internet.  I had the same problem with BASIC that I did with FORTRAN.  MY old BASIC interpreters will not run on new Microsoft operating systems (Thank you, Microsoft!).  I had been looking for a way to run some of my old BASIC routines and couldn't on my newer computers.  Just Basic seems to be the answer.  I've been able to run several of my old programs.

There is another GNU program called GIMP for GNU Image Manipulation Program which seems to do many of the things that Adobe Photoshop can do.  And the price is right, free!.  I have used Adobe Photoshop at work and have been able to pick up GIMP without much problem.

Finally, if you are actually going to write programs, you will need some kind of a text editor.  A professional text editor available for free is Crimson Editor.  It is ideal for writing program text.  Microsoft has a few editorsn that may already be on your computer such as Notepad and Wordpad..  They have some quircks (Yes, this is Microsoft) such as limitations on the file extensions you can use.  For instance .FOR is not allowed so the FORTRAN compiler wont recognize the program you wrote.

If any one is interested in any of this just catch me at a club meeting and/or send me an e-mail.  No, I'm really not a computer guy, but I've been working on and around them since the late 60's as anything from analysis tools to targets.  I would guess that any one who played with home comuters in the 70's andd 80's taught themselves BASIC and any one who had engineering or science from the 60's through the 80's learned FORTRAN.  Its still fun and there is a lot of neat stuff you can do.  And no I'm not a fan of Microsoft and PC's, but being realistic, if you're working in a technical field you will be using sa PC with Windows on it and there are things I'd much rather do than try to keep current on PC's and Mac's.

I would be happy to bring my laptop to a club meeting and show anyone interested these programs.  NEC/4NEC2, for instance, has a couple hundred ham antenna models that are quite excellent and include vertical arrays, log periodics, colinears, yagis, etc.  you can change dimensions, height above ground, ground properties, etc at will.   VOACAP also includes an antenna modeling tool which has several antennas of interest to hams as well as a few antennas for dreames like rhombics and curtain arrays used by shortwave broadcaster.

Kerry