Help about NEC...please

Hi,
I need to develop design and simulate wire antennas.
I've heard about NEC program.
Could anyone give me some help about where to find that software?
Is it free or can I obtain somewhere a similar software but free?
I've read that there are a lot of NEC distributions...miniNEC,NEC,EZNEC...
what's the differences?
Thanks in adv...
P.S. where could I find a tutorial on NEC also?

try search 'NEC2' on google, you will find couple of usable links on sources and different compilation and examples for DOS, Linux and windows.

one link is http://www.nec2.org/

NEC2 is a freely available wire moment-method code developed by LLNL. There have been several free GUI's wrapped around the command line executable. I would recommend using the one named 4NEC2. It is very good and easy to use. You can download it here:

http://home.ict.nl/~arivoors/

Here is the unofficial NEC2 homepage with lots of info:

http://www.si-list.org/swindex2.html

Good luck.

A free MMANA application is very good (Windows overlay on MININEC).Look e.g. http://www.smeter.net/antennas/mmana.php#Install