Numerical Electromagnics Code (Method of Moments) NEC simulates the electromagnetic response of antennas and metal structures. Jerry Burke and A. Poggio wrote the NEC/MOM family of programs at Lawrence Livermore Labs in 1981, under contract to the US navy. NEC2 was later released to the public and is now available on most computing platforms. This website gathers together NEC2 documentation and code examples from a group of leading scientists and engineers Please send contributions or questions to Trevor Marshall, the webmaster

Link here for information and instructions on how to run NEC2 in a Microsoft Windows environment. There is also a sample NEC model that you can use to test your setup.

Take a look at my tutorial for BYTE.com describing antennas for WLAN deployment

The BiQuad antenna is a simple 2.4GHz WLAN antenna suitable for for 802.11 use. Details on how to construct this antenna, both as stand-alone and as a parabolic dish feed can be found at this link. The NEC simulation model, and sample output, can be found here.

An HTML version of the Users Manual for NEC has been created by Peter Richeson.
There are three parts to the manual:

Part I:

NEC Program Description - Theory

1. HTML Verson
2. PDF Version (view with a left mouse click, download with right click-save target)

Part II:

NEC Program Description - Code

1. Not available yet

Part III:

NEC User's Guide

1. HTML Verson
2. PDF Version
3. Self extracting zipped MS Word Version (download with right click-save target)

Peter has also collected a history of NEC development.

Dave Michelson runs the NEC-LIST, a mailing list for discussion of discussing anything and everything to do with computational electromagnetics. This is a good place to discuss NEC with contributors from academic, government and industry labs around the world.Click here to join the NEC mailing list.

Links to other sources of NEC2 information:

Commercial Programs