Electromagnetic modelling with openEMS
Interested in modelling what’s going on through RF microstrips and microwave antennas? Maybe it’s time to try your hand at some electromagnetic modelling and do something with all the maths you learned as an undergrad…
openEMS is a free tool that can allow experimentation with antennas at microwave frequencies. The main site has a plethora of tutorials and (unsurprisingly) it’s also found its way over to Hackaday… check out the Hackaday article and read the comments below for some extra links and info from the project. Note you’ll need to run MATLAB or GNU Octave (if you haven’t used either of these that will be a good learning exercise, GNU Octave is free and Google is your friend for tutorials) and installation of openEMS is described as “not for the faint hearted”! Now there’s a challenge! 🙂
(and if all that’s a bit much to start with, Hackaday also has some great pointers to more antenna theory resources)
I’d like to point out that I have written a couple of more in-depth tutorials for openEMS and have provided the links in the Hackaday article. I post them here for convenience. More will follow in the future. For now here are tutorials for using openEMS to simulate the performance of a reflector antenna, and another on how to simulate high performance corrugated horn antennas. Also, shown in the pdf is a comparison between openEMS and a couple of commercial electromagnetic simulation packages, hopefully to give you confidence in the simulation results.
https://github.com/PaulKlasmann/Tutorial—Reflector-Simulation-with-openEMS
https://github.com/PaulKlasmann/Corrugated-Horn-openEMS-Tutorial