-------------------------------------------------------- ARRL Radio Designer README.TXT--V 1.51 (25 Mar 1998) -------------------------------------------------------- This file, which contains information about ARRL Radio Designer, an AF/RF circuit modeling software product, is itself a product of The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) 225 Main St Newington CT 06111 USA tel 860-594-0200 fax 860-594-0259 BBS 860-594-0306 email epubs@arrl.org README.TXT contains information that expands, corrects and clarifies ARRL Radio Designer's paper documentation. Please address additions, corrections and changes to the ARRL Electronic Publications Branch (email: epubs@arrl.org). This file looks best when viewed or printed with a fixed-pitch text font--for example, Courier or Courier New. Conventions: Asterisks (**) delimit italics, \/ delimits superscript, /\ delimits subscript. In the text to follow, the initial group *ARD* is sometimes used as an equivalent to the phrase *ARRL Radio Designer*. ARRL Radio Designer Front-Line Support -------------------------------------- ARRL HQ's Electronic Publications Branch provides front-line support for ARRL Radio Designer. Contact them at 860-594-0214 (fax 860-594-0259), or send email to epubs@arrl.org. ARRL Radio Designer World Wide Web Home Page -------------------------------------------- If you can browse the Web, do visit ARD's home page via the URL http://www.arrl.org/ard/ardpage.html This page is your one-stop Internet source for ARRL Radio Designer news, information, tips and example files. ARRL Radio Designer's File Transfer Protocol (FTP) Site ------------------------------------------------------- resides at the URL ftp://ftp.arrl.org/pub/ard and can be accessed via the ARD home page. README.TXT Topics ----------------- 0.x -- RELEASE NOTES 0.1 This ARRL Radio Designer 1.5 maintenance release includes a variety of bug fixes--the principal among which is that accurate modeling of TWO-port elements characterized by data that includes noise parameters is now enabled--and introduces a number of new features: 0.1.1 3-D dialog boxes and controls are now available, and the ARD 1.5 upgrade and full-installation products default to 3-D dialog mode. If necessary, you can turn off 3-D dialogs by using an ASCII text editor to modify the 3DControls line in the [Settings] section of the COMPACT.INI file (normally found in your system's Windows subdirectory). Because ARD1.5 ships with 3DControls=TRUE (enabled), its dialog boxes differ from the 2-D controls illustrated in the ARRL Radio Designer Manual. To turn the 3-D controls off, opening COMPACT.INI in Windows Notepad and make this line read 3DControls=FALSE. (Note: The file CTL3DV2.DLL, installed as both the ARD 1.5 upgrade and full-installation routines run, must be present in your system and findable by Windows for this feature to work. ARD benignly defaults to 2-D controls if you've set 3DControls=TRUE and CTL3DV2.DLL is somehow absent or cannot be located by Windows or ARRL Radio Designer at run time. 0.1.1 VSWR is now available for two-port networks. It was available only for one-ports in ARRL Radio Designer 1.0. 0.1.2 The additional circuit responses RZ1 (reciprocal of RY11) IZ1 (reciprocal of IY11) RY1 (reciprocal of RZ11) IY1 (reciprocal of IZ11) RZ2 (reciprocal of RY22) IZ2 (reciprocal of IY22) RY2 (reciprocal of RZ22) IY2 (reciprocal of IZ22) are now available for two-port networks in ARD 1.5. 1.x -- SETUP TOPICS 1.1 When installing ARRL Radio Designer you have the options of installing the databanks and the online manual. You can choose to not install them and instead access them directly from the CD-ROM. The online manual can be found in the CD-ROM's \MANUAL directory, while the databanks can be found in the \DATA directory. 2.x -- TROUBLESHOOTING TOPICS 2.1 Correcting system hangs. If your system hangs--that is, freezes in midflight and does not respond to keyboard and mouse input--during an ARRL Radio Designer session, your VGA display hardware and Windows video driver may conflict. Via the Options Change System Settings menu choice in Windows Setup, change Windows' Display driver to plain-vanilla VGA--just "VGA" in the Change System Settings Display menu. If this cures the hang, a video conflict is the probable cause. If this doesn't cure the hang, contact the ARRL Electronic Publications Branch at 860-594-0214 (voice), 860-594-0259 (fax) or via the Internet e-mail address epubs@arrl.org. 3.x -- PROGRAM TOPICS 3.1 Edit menu items inactive but ungrayed with when a table window selected. This is a bug. To copy a table to the Windows Clipboard, right-click in the table window and select Copy to Clipboard. 3.2 General Protection Faults, sqrt:DOMAIN or floating- point overflow errors may occur in analyses associated with tabular reports of Voltage Probe output. After you've created a table of voltage probe data, displayed it, and modified it and displayed it once again, initiating Modify Reports (that is, popping the Linear Reports [Edit Mode] dialog) for a second time causes a General Protection Fault. The workaround is to specify all of a table's Voltage Probe "traces" at report creation time. This bug does not affect the creation and modification of graphical reports containing Voltage Probe data. 4.x DOCUMENTATION TOPICS 4.0 *ARRL Radio Designer Manual* 4.1 Audit (Settings menu) coverage omitted in The ARRL Radio Designer Manual. The Audit feature is available via Settings or the hotkey Ctrl+T. Turning on Audit opens an Open File dialog that prompts you to name a preexisting or proposed *Audit file* (an ASCII text file with the extension .LST) in your ARRL Radio Designer directory. With Audit turned on, ARRL Radio Designer saves to the Audit file (appends to the file, if it already exists) the contents of any tables displayed at exit time. Audit can therefore be used as means of saving ARRL Radio Designer output data to disk in ASCII form. Note, however, that ARRL Radio Designer tables can also be saved in ASCII form by two command paths: (1) via the Reports Save Tables command (keyboard Ctrl+F7), which opens a dialog that prompts you for a filename with a default extension of .TXT; and (2) by copying them to the Windows Clipboard (right-click in a any table window to bring up the menu) and pasting them into a word processor capable of saving its contents to disk as ASCII text, such as Windows Notepad. 4.2 Misleading allusion to Windows Notepad as a means of importing databank data into netlists. On page 17-5 of The ARRL Radio Designer Manual, the section titled Data for ONE and TWO black-box elements includes the passage "Databank information can be manually copied in an ARRL Radio Designer netlist by opening the databank file with an ASCII text editor (Windows Notepad, for example) and copying it via [the] Windows Clipboard and ARRL Radio Designer's Circuit Editor." Many databank files exceed Notepad's maximum file-size limit, however. As an alternative, use Windows Write or another Windows word processor capable of reading ASCII files. 4.3 Manually imported databank data that does not include frequency units produces meaningless results and/ or the error message "Math error occurred. Program cannot continue." The convention for manufacturer-supplied SnP data requires that each data line's frequency specification (1) be in gigahertz and (2) omit the GHZ unit suffix, as in the S-parameter data line 0.047 0.77 -166 9.84 94 0.03 48 0.22 -88 where "0.047" means "0.047 GHz." The description on pages 17-10 through 17-15 of the data formats of standard (.flp) and secondary (.SnP) databank files, originally included as part of Compact's documentation of Super-Compact ability to pull in databank files *automatically* at analysis time notes, on page 17-14, that the default unit for *automatic* analysis-time data import in Super-Compact is gigahertz--but *this frequency-unit default does not operate for data hard- coded into a netlist's DATA block.*) A frequency spec of "0.1" on a databank line therefore means "100 MHz" when Super-Compact pulls it in on the fly, but "0.1 Hz" when Super-Compact or ARRL Radio Designer reads that line in from a hard-coded DATA block line. Data copied into the program *manually* for use with ONE and TWO elements therefore must include *fully explicit* frequency data--"fully explicit" as in "0.1GHZ" or "1E8" or "100MHZ", all of which specify the same frequency in ARD-speak. The data syntax shown in the Examples on page 17-6 (Data for ONE) and 17-8 (Data for TWO) therefore applies to databank data imported into ARRL Radio Designer by hand, with the further qualification that each data line's frequency spec must be fully explicit, as in 0.047GHZ 0.77 -166 9.84 94 0.03 48 0.22 -88 or 47MHZ 0.77 -166 9.84 94 0.03 48 0.22 -88 or 47E6 0.77 -166 9.84 94 0.03 48 0.22 -88 or 47000KHZ 0.77 -166 9.84 94 0.03 48 0.22 -88 --all of which specify the same S parameters at the same frequency. 4.4 Application information. A number of files are included that provide useful examples and tools for using ARD. These can be found in the \APP directory of the CD-ROM. See the README.TXT file in that directory for details.