Release Notes: Altair Feko 2022.2.2

Altair Feko 2022.2.2 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2022.2.2) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2022 or 2022.2 installation.

Feko is a powerful and comprehensive 3D simulation package intended for the analysis of a wide range of electromagnetic radiation and scattering problems. Applications include antenna design, antenna placement, microstrip antennas and circuits, dielectric media, scattering analysis, electromagnetic compatibility studies including cable harness modelling and many more.

newFASANT complements Altair’s high frequency electromagnetic software tool (Altair Feko) for general 3D EM field calculations, including, among others, special design tools tailored for specific applications like complex radomes including FSS, automated design of reflectarrays and ultra-conformed reflector antennas, analysis of Doppler effects, ultrasound systems including automotive or complex RCS, and antenna placement problems. Advanced solver technologies like the MoM combined with the characteristic basis functions (CBFS), PO/GO/PTD, GTD/PO and MLFMM parallelised through MPI/OpenMP, being some of them especially efficient for the analysis of electrically very large problems.

WinProp is the most complete suite of tools in the domain of wireless propagation and radio network planning. With applications ranging from satellite to terrestrial, from rural via urban to indoor radio links, WinProp’s innovative wave propagation models combine accuracy with short computation times.

WRAP is a comprehensive tool for electromagnetic propagation, antenna collocation and spectrum management. WRAP combines propagation analysis, often over large areas with many transmitters and receivers, with system analysis to include complex non-linear equipment properties.

Feko 2022.2.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to Feko are listed by component.

CADFEKO

Features

  • Added support for the Cartesian boundary format for near field receiving antennas.
  • The idle license check mechanism is suspended when running automation scripts (in interactive or non-interactive mode). This avoids license check errors during long-running scripts.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with the .pre file writing of the SD card where cable shields with admittance definitions were incorrectly using the impedance definition instead.
  • Long error and warning messages written to .pre files reflecting CADFEKO errors and warnings are truncated to 490 characters.
  • The polarity of voltage sources applied to wire ports is correctly maintained when using symmetry planes.
  • Resolved an issue where a skin effect was not correctly applied to wire segments on which a port was defined.
  • Resolved an issue where splitting closed geometry may have resulted in incorrect regions after the split.
  • Waveguide ports are now correctly managed depending on whether they are active, inactive or not referenced by different S-parameter configurations when generating .pre files.
  • Pre file writing for cable interconnects has been corrected for the case where two cable paths terminate at the same connector within the allowed tolerance (maximum dimension of volume containing all cable paths in the model times by 1e-4).
  • Fixed an issue that caused the Find Clashing Geometry Elements tool to become unresponsive.
  • Allow multiple of the same ports with different rotations for S-parameter requests (this may have caused the conversion of CADFEKO [LEGACY] models to fail).
  • Resolved an issue where entities in groups were not correctly labelled when generating the .pre file.
  • Resolved an issue where previews were not correctly shown for operations (Translate, Rotate, Copy and Translate etc.).
  • The model unit is correctly taken into account for predefined cable cross-sections (this may have impacted the conversion of legacy CADFEKO models).
  • Fixed the incorrect rendering of the arrows displayed for plane wave sources with non-zero polarisation angle.
  • Fixed missing snap points for imprinted points on geometry faces.
  • Improved the feedback provided when a region mesh cannot be generated from the bounding surface mesh. The region that failed to mesh is now included in the error message. Users should adjust the mesh settings or the model to obtain a valid mesh.
  • Fixed a crash when attempting to create a wire mesh port without first selecting a mesh edge.
  • Legacy .cfx files that include materials with relative permittivity set to 0.0 will now load successfully. During load, the offending value/s are adjusted to 1e-06 and the user is informed with a warning.
  • Fixed a crash when saving a .pre file that includes waveguide mesh ports with manually specified modes.
  • Updated the Pre-Process PollEx REI File application macro to use the correct syntax when filtering unnecessary via currents in the .rei file data.
  • Entities may now be selected through a periodic boundary condition visualisation in the 3D view and it is no longer necessary to disable the PBC preview.
  • A rendering error resulting in incorrect visualisation of the location of a custom workplane when setting the Origin value for far fields has been corrected.
  • Fixed a crash that may have been encountered when using snapping for point entry.
  • A source is not required for a cable harness when using a Radiating (taking irradiation into account) solution.
  • Wire ports, network terminals and transmission lines within the label scope of a model decomposition request are correctly reflected in the .pre file.
  • Fixed keyboard shortcuts using special characters - for example, # for Add Variable.
  • The CADFEKO script editor now correctly detects changes to an open script file and will prompt the user to ask whether the file should be reloaded.
  • When converting a nested geometry to primitive, ports and solution settings are no longer incorrectly removed from the geometry.
  • The validation of wires in PBC boundary has been corrected. Redundant wires/edges could have been created for geometry and PBC boundary combinations. Matching of faces and edges on the PBC boundaries has been improved to limit the matches to faces in the same part when there are multiple matching entities.
  • The correct front and back media for curved mesh faces are included in the .cfm file. In some cases, this was incorrect in previous versions.
  • Fixed a bug where incorrect mesh size settings would be applied to faces and edges when using symmetry.
  • Fixed an assertion that failed when pressing backtick (`) while on the start page.
  • Reworked zoom to extents so that all entities currently displayed in the view (including far field and near field request previews) are considered when calculating the zoom factor.
  • Point entry for the width of the cuboid primitive has been corrected.
  • The correct error message is shown when specifying an invalid .cfx file to load from the command line. The script will no longer be run when using the --run-script command line option in conjunction with loading an invalid .cfx file.
  • Improved point entry for the Axis direction field when applying a rotate transform on a custom workplane.

EDITFEKO

Features

  • Extended the RA card to support the Cartesian boundary format for near field aperture receiving antennas.

POSTFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • The detection of far field data in the DRE import application macro has been refined to correctly deal with different degree symbols in the data.

Solver

Features

  • Interpolation of Z-parameters from Touchstone data has been improved for some cases.

Resolved Issues

  • Reflected rays for near-zero reflection coefficients when using air-like characterised surface materials are no longer discarded in the RL-GO. In some cases discarded rays may have resulted in inaccurate results.
  • Added support for parallel simulations using OpenMPI on machines with an NVIDIA GPU.
  • Fixed an integer overflow in the allocation of memory that could have resulted in an internal error.
  • An error during inter-host communication that may have resulted in error 240 when running with more than one host has been resolved.
  • Adjusted the phase reference for the analytical waveguide TE and TM mode field expressions so that the zero phase reference is with respect to the transverse mode field components, rather than the axial mode field components. This ensures a consistent reference between all analytical waveguide port mode types and FEM modal port eigenmodes.
  • For iterative techniques, the minimum number of iterations should be at least 5 to avoid premature convergence (this was broken and incorrectly set to 1).
  • Resolved a performance regression during the near field to spherical mode transformation phase of a solution of a model with near field sources.

Support Components

Features

  • Converted the ideal power divider application macro from the CADFEKO [LEGACY] API to the new CADFEKO API.
  • The Compare CADFEKO Models application macro is now available in legacy and new CADFEKO.
  • The Load newFASANT Results application macro in POSTFEKO now fully supports near fields and RCS results.
  • Added a how-to in the Feko User Guide on interpreting far fields calculated from a PBC solution.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue with the generate array macro in CADFEKO so that amplitude tapering is correctly applied in both X and Y directions of the array where relevant.
  • Resolved an error where .fhm files generated by specific versions of Altair HyperMesh may have resulted in an unsupported card error.
  • Resolved an error when parsing CST NFS data.

WinProp 2022.2.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to WinProp are listed by component.

ProMan

Features

  • Diversity gain, of multiple mobile station antennas, is now considered during network planning in ProMan.
  • Corrected the calculation of the breakpoint distance in the Empirical Two-Ray Model. It is now calculated from the last diffraction point instead of from the transmitter.
  • Improved the multi-threaded performance of the mechanism used to write results as well as log simulation progress. This stage was a performance bottleneck in previous versions when simulating projects with many transmitters using a large number of threads.
  • Added an option to control the display of graphical elements (objects and entities not used in the simulation) in indoor projects.

Resolved Issues

  • Corrected the RSRQ calculation for LTE scenarios with traffic load less than 100%.
  • Corrected a case in calculation of rays scattered off a very rough surface where power scaling based on scattering tile size was not properly applied.
  • Resolved an issue with the superposition of rays in a fully polarimetric project that uses Fresnel coefficients.
  • The vertical knife edge diffraction in rural projects has been improved to create fewer diffraction points over rounded terrain profiles, especially when used in combination with the deterministic two-ray propagation model.
  • The total gain is now used for non-polarimetric projects with .ffe pattern files at the transmitter.
  • The Antenna RayProfile.txt result file in the MS Results folder now reports power values received at the mobile station.
  • Fixed situations in which a change in calculation parameters did not invalidate previous results.
  • Corrected the statistics information displayed for multi layer projects.
  • Results are now disabled in the result tree of ProMan if parameters related to the database are modified.
  • Added support for arbitrary angular ranges of transmitters consisting of antenna patterns read from .ffe files.

WallMan

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a bug that gave the third coordinate of the 2D views the wrong sign.

AMan

Resolved Issues

  • Added support for arbitrary angular ranges of transmitters consisting of antenna patterns read from .ffe files.

Application Programming Interface

Features

  • Improved the multi-threaded performance of the mechanism used to write results as well as log simulation progress. This stage was a performance bottleneck in previous versions when simulating projects with many transmitters using a large number of threads.

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the display of network planning results 3D view for projects with prediction planes computed using the API.

newFASANT 2022.2.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to newFASANT are listed by component.

GUI

Resolved Issues

  • A change was made to the installed configuration file to avoid problems on some systems where the GUI components of newFASANT did not start correctly.

General

Features

  • The Load newFASANT Results application macro in POSTFEKO now fully supports near fields and RCS results.

WRAP 2022.2.2 Release Notes

The most notable extensions and improvements to WRAP are listed by component.

General

Features

  • Enhanced the API to include a Status field for stations and equipment.

Resolved Issues

  • Corrected one of the atmospheric attenuation settings for propagation models used in the Interference tool.
  • Added time-availability to the ITU-R P.617 propagation model. Fixed an incorrect calculation of the tropospheric scattering angle in the ITU-R P.617 propagation model.