The future of NEC-like models

The method of moments (MoM) was the basis of the earliest large scale, general purpose EM modeling codes and the numerical electromagnetic code (NEC) traces its ancestry to one of the first of these large codes, AMP. Some of the gaps in the modeling capabilities available to the typical code user might be met now by making more of the developments of recent years available in documented and supported codes. NEC has been under continuing development, and a new release of the code is planed that will correct some problems in the present version in areas of wire modeling and code structure. Still, it remains basically a wire modeling code with some capabilities for surfaces. The present features of NEC and improvements planed for the next release are summarized, followed by a discussion of some possibilities for extending the capabilities of NEC or similar codes