Beyond Antennavis
_________________

This software was written by Kenneth E. Harker in 1998. I liked the 3D 
images of the presented antenna patterns on Kenneth's web-site so much 
that I have put some effort into creating a useable software package out 
it. So I contacted Kenneth to ask him how he thought about further 
development. Here is what he said:

___________________________________________________________________________
On Fri, Mar 25, 2005 at 01:10:54PM +0100, Joop Stakenborg wrote:
> Hi Kenneth,
> 
> I have been working on a Debian GNU/Linux package for antennavis and
> have done a lot of cleaning up in the process of creating the package.
> The GUI has had some cleanups, so it fits at least on a 1024x768 display
> and I have removed some of the unused functions. Also did put some time
> into clearing compilation warnings and compiling with the latest togl
> and tcl/tk 8.4.

Wow.

I didn't know anyone even knew about Antennavis anymore.
 
> I would like to upload this software to the debian archive if okay with
> you. 

That's OK with me.
 
> I am also interested in further development of antennavis if you are
> interested. Did you ever give it a thought to create some kind of
> project page for your software? Putting it on a website at
> sourceforge.net or savannah.nongnu.org would maybe help in further
> development of antennavis. This would encourage other people to join in
> and add features or fix/report bugs....

Antennavis was really just a two or three week project for one of my 
grad school classes.  We needed to demonstrate data visualization through
computer graphics.  We weren't really aiming for anything especially 
complex, and it only ever ran on SGI IRIX.

If you would like to put it on sourceforge or wherever, that's fine with me.
-- 
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker@kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/
___________________________________________________________________________

This package provides a tcl script called antennavis which makes 
use of the TkAnt binary. Antennavis will expect a nec2 binary 
somewhere in your path. The nec2 binary you are using should take 
filenames for arguments, e.g. "nec2 input.nec output.nec".

In case you can't meet these requirements, you can download a
statically linked nec2 version from:
http://www.qsl.net/pg4i/download/nec2bin-11.tar.gz
or: http://pg4i.mattsnetwork.co.uk/download/nec2bin-11.tar.gz

Here are some usage notes:

- Load a .nec file by clicking on 'Load Antenna File"
- Next, click on "Compute RF Field"
- nec2 will be started and input.nec and output.nec created
- The antenna pattern will be calculated and loaded

There was only one example in the original package which worked. I have 
tried to modify some, so we have more working examples. One of the 
problems seems to come from the 'PT' card, which is unknown by the 
nec version inside debian.

If you get the following warning at startup:

Xlib:  extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".

This means that Direct Rendering is not working for your setup. It is not
really something to worry about, antennavis will still work.

Antennavis has a project page at 
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/antennavis.
Feel free to send me an e-mail if you want to join in or if you have 
comments. There is also a web page at
http://www.qsl.net/pg4i/linux/antennavis. 

The old homepage by Kenneth is still viewable at:
http://n5xu.ae.utexas.edu/antennavis.

Joop Stakenborg <pg4i@amsat.org> march 2006.
