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I am looking for a free tool or codebase to visualize 2d and 3d antenna radiation patterns, as in the picture below:

enter image description here

Bonus points if open source. My goal is to visualise common antenna patterns in 2d and 3d to gather physical intuition, see the comments below for more details.

Image source

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    \$\begingroup\$ "visualization" requires that there's data – in what shape is that data currently? \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 14:55
  • \$\begingroup\$ I do not have data currently, I was hoping to have some preexisting common examples, as in uk.mathworks.com/help/antenna/gs/… to play with. \$\endgroup\$
    – Rexcirus
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 15:10
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    \$\begingroup\$ I'm confused. What is it that you want to achieve? \$\endgroup\$
    – Marcus Müller
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 15:16
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    \$\begingroup\$ If you know the pattern (as a formula or a data table) and just want to visualize it, there are several free software packages that can do that. If you want to solve Maxwell's equations to find the pattern for a given antenna shape, that's a much more difficult problem and I'm not aware of any free solution. (The paid solutions include Ansys HFSS and CST Microwave Studio) \$\endgroup\$
    – The Photon
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 15:45
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    \$\begingroup\$ @Rexcirus please edit your question ... add a link to the source of the diagrams \$\endgroup\$
    – jsotola
    Commented Nov 3, 2023 at 15:57

1 Answer 1

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It's not clear if you are looking for a plotting program or antenna simulator.

Antenna Simulator
4NEC2 is a free program that calculates antenna beampatterns and feedpoint impedance. 4NEC2 can produce 2D and 3D antenna beampatterns as shown below. 4NEC2 isn't the easiest program to figure out, but there are many examples which will help you understand the syntax of creating the antenna structure.

enter image description here
From 4NEC2 examples.

Graphing Programs
There are any number of free programs that support 3D graphing representations. Python, gnuplot, R, Octave, ...

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