Release Notes: Altair Feko 2021.0.2

Altair Feko 2021.0.2 is available with new features, corrections and improvements. This version (2021.0.2) is a patch release that should be applied to an existing 2021 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.

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.

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.

Feko 2021.0.2 Release Notes

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

CADFEKO

Feature

  • Added support for applying characterised surfaces to model mesh faces.

Resolved Issues

  • Resolved an issue where the application could close with a critical error when adding a schematic view. This could happen for views where extremely small elements are drawn when the view is zoomed to extents.
  • Avoided an assertion failing with the message Assertion failed: nodes.count() == 1 when connecting cable schematic elements across cable shields. An error is printed to the .pre file instead.
  • Resolved an issue that could cause an assertion failing with the message Assertion failed: numRows > 1 when modifying a ground plane after deleting media.
  • Resolved an issue where importing a Parasolid file could result in an assertion failing with the message common_ModelLabelPolicy.cpp (84): Assertion failed: convertOK. This problem was encountered when importing models containing parts with numerically-suffixed labels, for example part2_100, where the suffix was greater than 2147483647.
  • Resolved a problem that caused the Solution method setting on the Region properties dialog to show an indeterminate state when the regions are selected by using the Select all in part functionality.
  • Increased the maximum length and width of the geometry that can be generated using the create rough sea surface application macro script to 1000 m.

EDITFEKO

Resolved Issue

  • Fixed a problem with the SK card that was introduced in Feko 2021. Opening the card panel when the card was populated with a characterised surface definition triggered an error that the card contains unknown field values.

POSTFEKO

Resolved Issues

  • Improved the performance of plotting many results in a 3D view.
  • Reworked the 3D view legend drop-down menus to show a More... option when the active 3D view contains more results than will fit on the menu. Before, the menu would cut off, not allowing the user to select from all results on the view when setting the legend.
  • Fixed a regression in POSTFEKO 2021 where, after adding surface currents to a 3D view, it was not possible to turn off the currents display either by toggling the visibility or removing it from the results panel.
  • Fixed an issue where the selected Graphics driver setting on the Rendering options dialog was not persisted across instances of POSTFEKO.
  • An issue exists in POSTFEKO where plotting results in the 3D view with legends present could result in a crash when clicking in the 3D view. The crash occurs when the views are resized to be small and may be encountered when tiling many views. When encountering this crash, select a different Graphics driver on the Rendering options dialog. Note that the driver setting will only be applied to new 3D views that are created or opened after the setting is applied.
  • Resolved the following issues with far field export to .ffe file:
    • U and V were sometimes written out the column headers instead of Theta and Phi.
    • Corrected the number of samples when the Result type is RCS.
  • Changed the capitalisation of the File type field in .ffe, .efe, .hfe and .tr file exports to strictly adhere to the described format.
  • Fixed the concurrent export of multiple results to write the results to separate files, using the specified filename with the request label as suffix.
  • Resolved a problem with the normalisation of power traces in dB on Cartesian graphs. Normalisation was applied incorrectly when using the ribbon controls.
  • Resolved a problem with the calculation of transmission line length and incorrect values for transmission line length being displayed in the details tree.
  • Resolved an issue with the parameter sweep script where an error was triggered in Feko 2021 when selecting to run POSTFEKO from the batch run window.

Solver

Feature

  • The wire segment part of the geometry processing phase has been parallelised, resulting in significant time savings for models with many wire segments.

Resolved Issues

  • Accelerated the windscreen initialisation phase of parallel solution. Speed-up factors of 300x, compared to a previous version of Feko, are achievable depending on the size of the model and the number of parallel processes.
  • Improved the accuracy of models, consisting of dielectrics with a large dielectric constant, simulated with periodic boundary conditions.
  • Fixed a bug that led to incorrect results, due to compiler optimisations on Windows, when using the spherical harmonics based MLFMM solution.
  • Corrected inaccuracies when solving larger models with dielectric media junctions requiring out-of-core memory. This problem was introduced with performance improvements made to Feko 2019.3.

Shared Interface Changes

Feature

  • Added a transmission line calculator to the application macro library. This calculator can be used to calculate physical dimensions and electrical characteristics of microstrip, stripline and coplanar waveguide transmission lines.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a regression that got introduced in Feko 2021 that caused a 3D mouse to be completely unresponsive.
  • Added message feedback to the Graphics driver setting similar to the feedback that is given when modifying other rendering settings that require a new view to be opened before taking effect.

Support Components

Feature

  • Added the supported KBL version (v2.3) to Section 2.20.3 Harness Description List (KBL) Specification in the Feko User Guide.

Resolved Issue

  • Fixed a bug when fitting the response generated by adaptive frequency sampling of a model with a simulated bandwidth ratio of more than 100 (ADAPTFEKO).

WinProp 2021.0.2 Release Notes

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

General

Feature

  • Improved the display of fonts and icons on modern high-definition monitors.

Resolved Issue

  • Fixed a bug that resulted in the inability to display a project in 3D view over a remote desktop connection.

ProMan

Features

  • Added support for scattering consideration from topography/clutter triangles in predictions using the rural ray tracing model.
  • Implemented multi-selection for prediction points, for example, to delete many in one operation if desired.
  • Added support to display background images mapped to topography in 3D view.
  • Improved the description of the array azimuth angle in the mobile station settings dialog.
  • The minimum power azimuth spectrum resolution is now 0.25 degrees. Additionally power azimuth spectrum results are now in line with the ray angles for directions of departure/arrival.
  • Improved the functionality to import a transmitter from .csv such that all the quantities can be selected at once.

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed 3D view display problems on a secondary monitor.
  • The location offset for omnidirectional antenna elements can now be defined when setting up the mobile station.
  • The option to select a Components Catalogue is disabled for projects without network planning.
  • Fixed a bug that caused a crash when components are connected to a combiner.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in incorrect Doppler shift calculations when the velocity vector, defined in WallMan, is not normalised. This vector is henceforth internally normalised prior to Doppler shift calculations.
  • Fixed a crash that could occur when the dominant path model is used in combination with a non-horizontal prediction plane.
  • For rural projects using the parabolic equation method, all pixels are now computed.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented selecting desired number of Rx elements in the mobile station settings dialog.
  • Removed Traffic Class Specification from the drop-down list available under the Data menu option. Traffic class specification can be done under the Traffic tab of the project parameter settings.
  • The progress window is now left open if the option Leave window always open when completed is selected during network planning.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented display of the RunMS sub-channel results in the result tree when the Save prediction results of each antenna/cell in individual sub-directory option is selected under Global settings.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the total phase of the field reported in Channel Matrices per Point to differ from the correct phase reported in the .str file.
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in a crash when all components, such as amplifiers or combiners, are simultaneously deleted from the Components tab of the project's settings.

WallMan

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed 3D view display problems on a secondary monitor.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented saving a database in WallMan, after adding clutter classes.

CompoMan

Resolved Issues

  • Fixed a bug that caused a crash when a user-defined category was edited or deleted.
  • Fixed a bug that caused a crash when a user-defined field was added.

Application Programming Interface

Feature

  • Added support for network planning using OFDM broadcasting in the WinProp API.

newFASANT 2021.0.2 Release Notes

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

GUI

Feature

  • Added a table to show/edit directions (theta/phi angles) to be used by the newFASANT PO module. This ability allows for RCS computations in an arbitrary set of directions. This information can be imported from and exported to a text file.

Solver

Resolved Issues

  • Added an error message to the newFASANT GTD module indicating when some mesh-derived information is not up to date for the current solution and re-meshing is required.
  • Improved the parallelisation scheme in the GTD module of newFASANT for cases where multiple processors are available and there is only one observation point.
  • Extended the information written by the newFASANT GTD module to the projecth.ray file to include the coordinates of the ray interaction points.