gEDA-user: Announcement: Wcalc first public release (0.9)

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am pleased to announce that after way too many years of off and on
development the first public release of Wcalc is available.

Wcalc is a tool for the design and analysis of transmission lines and
related structures.  In the analysis mode, the physical parameters are
given to wcalc which then calculates the electrical parameters.  In the
synthesis mode, desired electrical parameters are given and wcalc
calculates the required physical parameters.

Currently suported structures are:

- single microstrip transmission lines
- single stripline transmission lines
- coupled microstrip transmission lines
- integrated circuit microstrip lines (metal-insulator-semiconductor)
- coaxial transmissions lines
- single layer, air core, solenoid inductors

Wcalc contains a core library with the numerical routines and several
frontends for accessing the library.  The currently supported frontends are:

- standalone gtk gui (gtk1 or gtk2)
- scilab
- octave
- matlab
- cgi for web browser access
- very simple stdio interface.  This last one is primarily intended to
let other programs which do not support loading of dynamic modules to
access libwcalc.  For example, you could open a 2 way pipe in a gawk
program and have a wcalc enabled gawk!

You can find out more about wcalc at the wcalc homepage at
http://wcalc.sf.net

You can test drive the cgi frontend by following the cgi-wcalc link from
that page.

For those of you who may have used mcalc (http://mcalc.sf.net), wcalc is
similar in spirit but with expanded capability.

Bugs may be reported on the wcalc sourceforge project page which is
linked to from the main wcalc page.  Discussion about the tool may take
place on the appropriate gEDA mailing list.

Enjoy!

-Dan