Transmission lines, including directional couplers, of arbitrary cross section and an arbitrary number of dielectrics can be analysed with atlc. The impedance Zo of a two-conductor transmission line, as well as the odd-mode, even-mode, differential mode and common mode impedances of a directional coupler can all be computed with atlc. Tools to both analyse and synthesise directional couplers are available.
atlc likely to be of use to radio amateurs, professional RF engineers, students and academics.
Great effort has been put into making atlc portable. Whilst written under UNIX, atlc's portability means pre-compiled command-line Windows binaries have been produced by Mark Chun KH6HPQ and others from the source code without any changes at all. A port to OpenVMS in a possibility, although the main development is aimed very much at UNIX.
In addition to the the commmon Linux PC, atlc has been tested on a Sony Playstation 2 as well as the Cray YMP-EL supercomputer, which is available for free public access at Cray-Cyber network.
It has also been tested on Debian Linux, Slackware Linux, Gentoo Linux, Redhat Linux, Suse Linux, IBM's AIX, Apples's OS X for Mac,
HP's HP-UX (both PA-RISC and Itanium), SGI's IRIX, Sun's Solaris, SCO's UNIXWare, HP's Tru64, Cray's UNICOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. If you run atlc on any other operating system, please let me know.
Previous version of atlc could use multiple-processors if present, to reduce execution time. This has been temporarily disabled, as the algorithm had some intermittent problems on IBM's AIX operating
system. Careful checking showed the problem that only seemed to affect AIX, was a real bug with the potential to occur on other operating systems, although it only ever showed up under AIX. Hence the current release has disabled the support for multiple processors - atlc will run fine on multi-processor machines, but it will only use one of them. A revised method of computation has been determined, which will re-enable the use of multiple processors. It is hoped to release this by early November 2004 at the latest - probably some time in October 2004.
atlc is written and supported by Dr. David Kirkby (G8WRB), who works at the department of Medical Physics, University
College London. He has to suffer the Southminster Branch Line to get to work.
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