CADFEKO Features in FEKO Suite 5.5

The CADFEKO development team has invested considerable effort during the current release cycle in implementing a User Centered Design (UCD) process to help streamline the way that CADFEKO works with geometry creation and workplanes.  Several users participated during user testing phases of the process to help specify several new and optimised features in CADFEKO.

The basis of most of these new methods and also the most visible change is the rework of the way that workplanes are handled and the addition of an auto-snapping feature.  Both these features are highly intuitive to use, but is still customisable to a user's specific requirements.  A long, step-by-step explanation of these feature is hardly necessary and users are invited to evaluate these features for themselves with FEKO Suite 5.5.  It should be enough to note that users should make extensive use of the CTRL-SHIFT key combination as this activate previews of where snaps or workplanes are currently located and that snapping settings may be customized by right-clicking on the 3D geometry window and selecting "snapping settings" from the context menu.

The following are some highlights in CADFEKO of FEKO Suite 5.5.

Improvements to primitive creation

• Primitive dialogs open with sensible default values allowing easy placement of objects and a better visual indication of how a parameter affects the primitive.
  

Previews of how a parameter in an object scales its dimensions
Bottom width	Top depth	Height

Snapping

• Snapping control has been replaced with auto-snapping by snapping to special points (face centre, edge centre, etc.) close to the mouse pointer.
  
• Snapping also snaps to a clever dynamic grid that resizes to the most suitable size for the current view.

Special snapping points	Dynamic grid snapping

New align tool  

In support of antenna designers who are concerned with antenna placement problems, the CADFEKO team created the align and place tool.  Any part is now geometrically related to its own workplane, which can easily be translated and rotated in a single operation.  E.g. a user might import a CAD model for an aircraft and the CADFEKO model for a microstrip patch antenna created with Antenna Magus into the same CADFEKO environment.  Both will have their reference workplanes located at the global origin.

Align tool

Distance measuring tool

It is often necessary to measure the physical distance between two points.  The addition of the distance measurement tool (depicted with a tape-measure icon) makes this a very easy task.  The tool can be activated in a number of ways, e.g. clicking the icon in the "tools" button-bar in CADFEKO or right-clicking in the 3D geometry window and selecting the distance measurement tool from the context menu.

Analytical curves primitive

Design equations are prevalent for many shapes of interest to antenna designers, CAD modellers, etc.  CADFEKO now provides an analytical curves primitive that can be used to mathematically specify such designs.  This tool makes it possible to exactly specify any mathematically defined shape, without having to approximate the shape with piecewise linear, splined or other curve approximations.

Analytical curves dialog