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cocoaNEC 2.0
Kok Chen, W7AY [w7ay (at) arrl (dot) net]


cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Mac OS X application for designing and modeling antennas. As indicated by the name, cocoaNEC uses the Cocoa framework of Mac OS X.

The application is free and it can be downloaded from the Download page (which can also be accessed by using the Download tab button at the top of this page). The Xcode project with the cocoaNEC sources can also be downloaded from the same page. For non-commercial use, the source code for cocoaNEC 2.0 is free.

Online tutorials, reference manuals and example files for the application are available through the User's Manual tab button. The What's New page lists features that have changed since the previously released versions of cocoaNEC 2.0.

The Snow Leopard version of cocoaNEC makes use of the Grand Central Dispatch technology in Mac OS X to make use of all the cores on a modern Intel based Macintosh. This version works on both Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) and Lion (Mac OS X 10.7).

The Tiger version of cocoaNEC 2.0 is a Universal Binary application. It runs natively on both Intel based and PowerPC based Macintosh computers that use Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or newer.

Except for the graphics elements, the Tiger version of cocoaNEC uses multiple cores of a processor only when modeling an antenna at multiple frequencies. The Snow Leopard version will use multiple cores for other parts of NEC-2 that are compute intensive.

Please note that the NEC-4 engine cannot make use of Grand Central Dispatch even with the Snow Leopard version of cocoaNEC. Except for the graphics portion of cocoaNEC, multi-core acceleration only functions when you use the internal NEC-2 engine.