cocoaNEC Reference Manual
Input Interfaces
The NEC engines expect antenna geometry (wires, surface patches, etc) and control input (loads, excitation voltages, frequencies, etc) in the form of a Hollerith "card deck." Each "card" consists of a text line of up to 80 characters. The card formats are defined in the Program Input section of the NEC-2 documentation.
The NEC-4 card formats are mostly the same as NEC-2. NEC-4 has cards that do not appear in NEC-2, and some cards, such as the GH card, have different formats.
There are two methods in cocoaNEC to convert user antenna models into a NEC card deck. One of these methods is a C-like interpreter (called NC), where geometries are described with formulas. The second is direct card deck input, with a card editor. NC Reference describes the NC interpreter in detail.
File Menu
The cocoaNEC File Menu is used to open and save the antenna models.
The menu items in the first group are used to open NC models, and the File menu items in the second group are used to open files that are formatted as NEC "Card Decks."
The Save and Save As... menu items are common to both input interfaces. When Save or Save As... is selected, the antenna model in the currently active window will be saved to a file. The default file extension for an NC file is ".nc" and the default file extension for a card deck is ".deck".
You can convert an NC program into a NEC card deck using Export Card Deck... . Like cocoaNEC, many other antenna programs are able to accept NEC card decks.
In addition to displaying antenna data that are generated from a cocoaNEC workflow, cocoaNEC's Output Window can also display graphical data that are created by other programs, as long as those programs can produce the nec2c or NEC-4 output ("line printer") formats. Use Open Output File to load that kind of file.
The Close menu item will close the active model window. CocoaNEC remains open even when there are no remaining open windows.
NC Editor
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Card Deck Input
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