Actix, a specialist in radio frequency simulation and optimization solutions, today announced that a new student edition of its Radiowave Propagation Simulator (RPS) will be made available for download free of charge with immediate effect. RPS can be used as a strong base to study the effects of LTE and MIMO, says Actix.
Actix' free RPS download is a fully-functional version, with only minor restrictions on the size of datasets supported, allowing students free access to study RF propagation in small radio environments using the full set of tools available to the professional user. RPS can be used to generate simulations of small indoor and outdoor radio environments such as WLAN, WIMAX, Mesh, UMTS, CMDA2000, and LTE, allowing investigations into the effects of penetration, reflection, diffraction, polarization, new 4G modulation techniques and new smart antenna technologies.
"Actix is a radio engineering and optimization company, with strong roots in the academic community and we would like to give the next generation of RF engineers the chance to use the same suite of tools they will find being used in the industry", said Joerg Schueler, Director of Automatic Optimization Products at Actix. "Actix' toolsets are trusted to provide simulation and optimization results to hundreds of the world's largest mobile operators, equipment vendors and R&D organizations, and we hope that early experience with the full functionality of these advanced tools will open many new employment and research opportunities for future radio engineers. We are always interested to hear about the innovative academic studies being carried out using these solutions".
RPS uses full 3D ray launching algorithms to predict the precise performance of radio channels, an approach that has several advantages over other algorithms, which is said to make it the best choice for high performance propagation prediction, accurate coverage results, and the teaching of best practises. RPS Student can be upgraded to allow unlimited parallelization for more in depth research needs – one reference installation consists of a fully equipped 56-processor blade server, each running a separate prediction engine. The latest release also allows the study of MIMO technologies, when combined with suitable plug-ins.
RPS has an integrated Environment Editor with layer support, plug-in support for custom propagation models, surface plots, and post-processing applications, and can import environment data from dozens of source CAD formats. RPS also has several built-in 2D/3D surface plot functions that provide overviews of a wide variety of results.
RPS comes complete with several sample environments, allowing educators to provide a complete virtual RF laboratory to radio engineering students immediately, and a full user manual, with tutorials on a wide variety of RF propagation subjects.