Hello,
Circad, primarily. By Holophase. GREAT program! Can do it all, from
Schematic, to pcb layout, to milling. Even allows you to reverse
engineer from bitmaps/scans of existing boards.
Also Eagle, and contour2(French) included trace isolation. VHF is
another I useta use. Good program; German origin, isolation milling
possible.
Hope this helps,
Ballendo
P.S. Circad used to be offered to Hams at a greatly reduced price.
May still be in effect.
--- In
Homebrew_PCBs@yahoogroups.com, "emailw8nf" <emailw8nf@y...>
wrote:
> I've been a lurker on here for a while. I haven't seen much
> discussion of the layout software we experimenters like to use.
>
> The last time I did any "volume" of homebrew PCBs, I just used
> something like Microsoft Paint!
>
> But now, it seems there are many freeware or demoware software
> packages available for this work. I'm curious what people tend to
> use, and what the particular benefits are of the package chosen?
>
> I've been using QCAD - has its ups and downs. Good news it can
output
> a Gerber file, which can then be manipulated in any Gerber viewer,
and
> printed/zoomed, etc. Also it ties together the schematic and the PC
> board, so once you're done with the schematic, you go to layout,
move
> the parts around, and place traces to satisfy the rat's nest. But a
> lot of this is clumsy, and doing re-work is very tedious. It's also
> very time-consuming to create anything other than 90 degree straight
> lines with any accuracy. For those of us who are trying to roll out
> PC boards for things like 300 watt UHF amplifiers, that limitation
can
> be a killer.
>
> What do others use?
>
> Kindly,
>
> Dave