Online application for representation of the radiation pattern of antenna arrays

Students should learn how to plot the radiation patterns of arrays of antennas in undergraduate and graduate courses on antennas. Simple chalk plots do not provide a good idea of the radiation patterns, especially for three dimensions. The authors began to work with MATLAB GUIs in order to provide an application that achieved high-quality radiation-pattern graphics and good interaction with the students, allowing them to change the different parameters of the array and to visualize the whole process of pattern plotting. Nevertheless, we found that the students wanted to have the same application for testing and studying at home, but many of them did not have copies of the MATLAB environment. The authors then looked for a solution that was portable, free, and that did not require any specific software in order to run. In order to give access to the application via the Internet, we imported our functions in MATLAB to GNU Octave, an open-source software package with characteristics similar to MATLAB but freely redistributable under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).