ANCAN: An Integrated Software Tool for the Analysis and Characterization of Antenna Arrays

Guidelines of the new European Higher Education Area recommend introducing new technologies and new educational techniques, especially in scientific areas, by means of multimedia contents and software tools. This is of special interest in careers related to information and society technologies, as is the case for electrical and electronics, computing, and telecommunication engineering. In order to take advantage of the new educational context, the following paper describes the software tool ANCAN, which has been created to help telecommunication engineering students with the analysis, design, and representation of electromagnetic fields created by antenna arrays. Different effects can be studied with the results displayed interactively, allowing easy understanding. The survey of tasks regarding the characterization of antenna arrays and field representation, as well as its integral visual interface and the treatment of any electromagnetic source distribution as a generalized antenna array, surpasses its original educational orientation, becoming a useful tool for antenna engineering.