Jerry Burke, 14 February 2021

| March 11, 2021

Gerald J Burke, known as Jerry, was co-author of the Numerical Electromagnetics Code / Method of Moments (NEC/MoM) antenna simulation software, passed away on 14 February 2021 after a battle with cancer.

Many amateurs will be familiar with NEC images such as these.

Working with A Poggio, Jerry wrote the NEC software for the US Navy in 1981 while working at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Version 2 of the software (NEC2) was later publicly released and is now available on most computing platforms. A number of different ‘front end’ systems have been written for the code, one of which (EZNEC) is widely used by amateurs for antenna modelling. Jerry continued developing the software up to the recently-released version 5 (which was discussed in the March 2021 edition of RadCom, p34). Whether or not they personally used one of the NEC variants, it is likely that a good fraction of amateurs own at least one antenna that was developed with the aid of Jerry’s software, and for that we owe him our gratitude.

Category: Silent Keys