New Yagicad 5.2 - still free and now containing Genetic Optimisation.

Paul McMahon October 2007

Available processing power continues to increase and with version 5.2 it has become
practical to do multi-frequency or whole of band optimisation.

The major addition to Yagicad 5.2 is another option under the Auto Optimise menu to
provide an Overall Optimised Wideband Array item:
      Menu -> Calculate -> Auto Optimise -> OWA Overall

With this option it is possible to take a design and use a genetic style algorithm
to "breed" a Yagi that has optimised values for several factors across a range of
frequencies. 

The genetic factors that can be varied include:

  -  The Measure of Fitness - in terms of the relative merits of Gain,
      Front to Back, 50 Ohm direct connect Return Loss, Side Lobe levels, etc.

  -  The World Size - Bigger is better but larger populations take much
      longer to calculate.  Start with a small number and be patient.

  -  The Breeding Size - How many of the population will breed.

  -  The Mutation Level - How often random mutations are introduced.

  -  The Mutation Variance - The size of mutations allowed.

All of these factors can be set by editing the pain text file "Yagicad.gen"
with a plain text editor notepad.  Further details will be found in the
Yagicad.gen file.

Note:  While Yagicad will only directly show the best fit yagi, like all
genetic programs there are actually a number of optimised designs produced.
It is often a good idea to have a look at these other designs as there may be
something worth investigating further.  To do this in Yagicad choose the
"Save top 10" button on the OWA control screen which will allow you to save the
top 10 designs as a .csv file that can be opened by MS excel etc.