cocoaNEC 2.0 Reference Manual
NEC Engines

Kok Chen, W7AY [w7ay (at) arrl (dot) net]
Last updated: January 10, 2012

NEC Engines

cocoaNEC can use two different NEC engines. One of the engines is a C Language port of NEC-2 (nec2c) that is embedded into cocoaNEC itself. The second engine is the NEC-4 program that cocoaNEC runs as a separate process.

To install NEC-4 for cocoaNEC, please see here.

To choose between the two engines, open the Preferences panel from the CocoaNEC 2.0 Menu in the main Menu Bar.

After a NEC engine has finished execution, its results are passed to the cocoaNEC Output Window.



Grand Central Dispatch

The nec2c that is embedded into Snow Leopard version of cocoaNEC had been modified to make use of Mac OS X Grand Central Dispatch. This allows multiple cores of newer Macintoshes to run concurrently, and significantly speeds up complex antenna models.

The FORTRAN based NEC-4 process only runs in a single core and cannot benefit from Macintosh computers that have multiple cores.

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