[TowerTalk] Suggestions -- VNA, Smith Chart Software

[Jim Lux]

On 5/9/12 4:05 PM, Grant Saviers wrote:

> Last time I wanted to buy MatLab (for some servo work) the cheapest
> license was over $1K and I'm not sure for how long.  There are ~$100
> student versions, but they are tied tightly to courses, proof of
> enrollment, and have date expirations, IIRC.  There is an open source
> competitor SciLab, but I have no experience with it.


yes.. $99 academic license, if you qualify...
Octave is free and it might work, although the reason I like Matlab over 
Octave is because the plotting works better and is more integrated 
(Octave shells out to gnuplot, so you have all those issues to work with)

But what I have for smith charts and Matlab is more for plotting than 
design.

The old XLZIZW excel spreadsheet did a nice job ingesting tabular 
impedance data and then doing a smith chart with matching components, 
but it doesn't work on new versions of excel.





>
> Grant KZ1W
>
> On 5/9/2012 8:33 AM, Jim Brown wrote:
>> On 5/8/2012 9:01 PM, Jim Lux wrote:
>>> what do you want to do with the software?  Design matching networks, or
>>> just display stuff?
>> Design matching networks, primarily with transmission lines.
>>
>>> Do you have experience with Matlab?
>> No.
>>
>>> There's a bunch of nice Smith chart manipulation stuff with Matlab (and most of it seems to work with Octave, too)
>> Last I heard, Matlab was pricy.
>>