I am glad that at least one person recognized my attempt at humor. The cheap-skate's antenna modelling package is NEC2, which is public domain. It is a Method-

I am glad that at least one person recognized my attempt at humor. The cheap-skate's antenna modelling package is NEC2, which is public domain. It is a Method-of-Moment solver, not FDTD which is much more useful at microwaves. But for UHF and below, NEC2 is great as long as you know how to dodge the (reasonably well understood) deficiencies. The downside is that it is from the age of FORTRAN, so the native interface is column-sensitive punch card images. People have done free or low-cost wrappers, though, to take the misery out of it. NEC4 fixes a number of the model bugs in NEC2, but the last I heard NEC4 fell under ITAR, so requires a license. I don't know of a freebie FDTD EM package, though.