QucsStudio – HF Circuit and EM Field Simulator | Hacker News Reader

QucsStudio – HF Circuit and EM Field Simulator

qucsstudio.de

32 pointsexar081517 comments

Please guys support the original qucs instead of qucs studio which is not open source but closed and users are dependent on the good will of the author.

Right! And qucsStudio is Windows only, I believe.

Qucs runs on Linux, MacOS, and Windows.

http://qucs.sourceforge.net/

Why? From a quick review of the videos, he has added some impressive features such as harmonic balance and planar EM. Then again, it’s nowhere near the professional tools such as Microwave Office, so I’ll continue to pay for those.

It's amazing how much is in Qucs already. I'll have to take a look. Agreed that the professional tools have a long and deep head start - I couldn't justify spending my time wrangling Qucs either.

Yes, QucsStudio is closed but it is improving, with the sole work of one maintainer. He asked for some support, without much success. Also, although it is closed, check the improvements of QucsStudio over Qucs and see if he only cloned the project and said it is his or if he really care about a better simulator. Also to be clear, Qucs helped me a lot when I was searching free and open source simulator, and even showed me the world of open source, but the latest release is from 2017. QucsStudio still improving, and improving. Site, docs, tutorials, etc.

As both are good projects, and one is the foundation of the other, I think both deserve some credit and support.

Isn't qucs licensed under the GPL? Which would make that quite illegal.

FWIW, the developer of QUCS Studio, is Michael Margraf, the original founder of the QUCS project

What would experts here recommend for simulating 5ghz and 10ghz USB 3 on a particular gerber file and layup?

I've been avoiding it and spinning boards making small changes hoping for the best but still having issues. And don't have the resources to buy a scope capable of doing an eye diagram at 10ghz

Also bonus question.. How good are the simulations? Am I likely to be able to iterate on my layout and improve the eye diagram and order boards which have a good chance of working?

Has anyone gotten this to work? I was trying to use this as a free alternative to ADS but this didn't seem to quite work.

not tried myself but here is some documentation: http://www.gunthard-kraus.de/qucsstudio/index_english_qucsst...

Well, I used it for a class, and it was fine for class purposes.

I did notice significant differences in modeled circuit performance between versions of Qucs Studio, for even very simple models. Instead of trying to get to the bottom of that problem, I just used the same version as the instructor and called it "good enough."

But "good enough" for a class is definitely not "good enough" for the workplace. Either I was doing something stupid (quite likely) or you should stick with ADS.

I haven't tried QucsStudio but Qucs has worked when I tried it. It's too bad development on Qucs seems to have stalled.

My favorite fast, simple, and free linear simulator is still Puff: https://www.pa3fwm.nl/software/puff/

Thanks!

Actually the development of Qucs is ongoing, it's just that they are a little late on making the jump from Qt 4 to Qt 5, so Qucs isn't in available in some distributions that removed Qt 4 at the moment (e.g. Arch).

It works quite well for linear network simulations (eg: plugging together black box S-parameters from manufacturer data or extracted from a VNA) and it works reasonably well for filter synthesis. I've never used the harmonic balance simulator or the new planar EM sim though.

What does this offer over say LT-Spice?

Good for RF sims. It's free compared to ADS which is NOT.

You can use LTSPICE for some kinds of e.g. transmission line models but it doesn't have things like the Smith chart built in.

You also can use Qucs for modeling things you'd normally use SPICE for but the library isn't there, so it's not worth the trouble.

Basically, two different tools for completely different sets of problems.

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