Release Notes: Altair Feko 2023.0.2
Altair Feko 2023.0.2 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2023.0.2) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2023 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 2023.0.2 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to Feko are listed by component.
CADFEKO
Resolved Issues
- Model status verification will only indicate Error 19956: Dielectric faces may not be located on the interface of the planar Green's function when the error is relevant.
- Fixed voxel meshing failures for specific models, especially at higher frequencies.
- Resolved an issue where ports went missing when converting a part to primitive. Ports that were placed on geometry parts deeper than three levels inside the root geometry were erroneously being removed when converting the outer level part to primitive.
- Prevented an assertion failure when loading a legacy model containing faulty parts. The model can now be opened and an error message in the model status window indicates which parts are problematic.
- Fixed a crash when modifying the cross section of a cable instance to a new cross section with fewer signals.
- A failed deletion of cable connectors and schematic components will not result in duplicated 'ghost' symbols on the schematic.
- Resolved a crash during legacy conversion for a model with overlapping terminals and nets.
- Resolved an issue where the .pre file writing of SD cards omitted the transfer admittance definition of a cable shield. The solver could terminate with ERROR 52750: Define shield properties: expecting an impedance and/or admittance specification when running a model where the cable shield transfer admittance definition was set to reference an external XML file.
- When saving a model, the saved state indicator (*) was not correctly cleared after saving completed.
- Resolved a crash when undoing a sweep or spin operation on geometry.
- Improved handling of faulty parts for CAD models. This speeds up load time.
- Resolved an issue where the project filter was not correctly filtering faces with default medium set.
- Fixed an issue where the modification of a geometry part did not take effect if the part was previously deleted and reinstated using the undo operation.
- Added a minimise button to the Executing runfeko dialog.
- Improved the modify variables tool to allow editing of Minimum and Maximum values while Limiting is unchecked.
- Resolved an issue where the Polyline and Polygon dialogs could sometimes get into a strange state when clicking Add. This strange state resulted in crashes.
- Updated the verification message that gets issued when a cable harness solved with the multiconductor transmission line (MTL) solution method intersects with a conducting surface or a PEC ground plane. Previously, the same error message was issued as for the case where the distance from the conducting surface or ground plane is too large.
- Resolved an issue where there was no icon in the tree indicating if local mesh settings were applied to primitive geometry parts.
- Improved legacy CADFEKO model conversion for models where the normal direction of selected faces was reversed in earlier versions. Before this change, such models may have failed to convert to the latest CADFEKO format.
- Resolved a crash when invalid signal connections were applied on the Create Cable Instance dialog.
- The Windows Security Alert firewall exception dialog is no longer shown when opening the Altair Material Data Center.
- Resolved an issue where FEM ports could not be created for meshes if there were only FEM meshes in the model.
- Symmetric verification for face normals is no longer checked when the face medium is set to perfect electric conductor, dielectric boundary or default.
- Fixed a crash after loading overlapping frequency bands from the model in the Create Frequency Ranges application macro.
POSTFEKO
Resolved Issue
- Resolved an issue with near field exports where local coordinate axes would not be written out to .efe and .hfe file for near fields in the global coordinate system with only an offset specified.
Shared Interface Changes
Support Components
Features
- During AMRFEKO runs, error estimates will not be written to the out file by default so that large out files are avoided.
- The temporary files created by AMRFEKO now include “_amr_” in the name for easy identification.
Resolved Issues
- During an AMRFEKO run, the number of completed and remaining solutions is correctly reflected in the standard output.
- The standard output of AMRFEKO does not include duplicate linefeeds/newlines.
- Transformed geometry (TG card) is correctly managed during the execution of an AMRFEKO run.
- Corrected the command line parsing so that --keep-files can be used with AMRFEKO and other utilities such as ADAPTFEKO.
WinProp 2023.0.2 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to WinProp are listed by component.
General
Feature
- Resolved an error that occurred when converting a .tub database to .ida or .idb file format.
Resolved Issue
- A more coarse resolution from the Elevation Profile dialog when exporting a tunnel topo to .idb file is only suggested when the area covers more than 10 million pixels.
ProMan
Feature
- Relaxed the condition for the monostatic RCS consideration so that all pixels in the direction back to the transmitter are computed.
Resolved Issues
- Resolved an issue where a log file (WinPropLogfile.txt) was written out for urban computations when a warning was encountered.
- The conditions for the calibration of the wave propagation models (DPM, IRT, SRT) are now checked before the computation.
- Resolved an issue where projects containing area wide and prediction planes, the status bar showed “N.C.” for area result values.
- Fixed a bug for the urban IRT where the reflection point was at z=0 instead of the correct tile center location.
- Resolved an issue where only the first Rx height was computed and displayed for rural projects based on geodetic coordinates. This was corrected, and multiple Rx heights can now be computed and displayed.
- Resolved an issue where the computation of a project using SBR resulted in a long runtime due to freeing memory.
- Fixed a bug where, for very small resolution, no prediction plane was created for the repeater, which resulted in the repeater contribution being missing in the network planning result.
- Resolved an error for network planning if the MS results were saved in individual sub-folders that can be configured under .
- The palette for the display of computed results is now correctly loaded and saved in the .wpi file.
- Resolved an issue where higher computation time was observed when compared with previous releases.
- Resolved an issue with the Urban Knife Edge model where the wrong coordinates were used during propagation for point prediction at absolute height.
WRAP 2023.0.2 Release Notes
The most notable extensions and improvements to WRAP are listed by component.
General
Feature
- Statistical results in coverage that decreases with distance, for example, Field strength and Received Power, are sorted in reverse order to align with the coverage information page on the Edit result dialog.
Resolved Issues
- Resolved an issue where the full power from the base station is now used in the SINR calculation instead of the reduced power when the cell load is less than 100%.
- On the Separation Distance dialog, enable the Calculate Distance button with default settings by changing the default calculation mode to area mode for the default propagation model (Longley-Rice).