Installation

anaconda (recommended)

The easiest way to install scikit-rf is to first install anaconda, a binary package manager for python modules. Once anaconda is setup you can install scikit-rf by entering the following into a terminal (do not forget the -c conda-forge option):

conda install -c conda-forge  scikit-rf

pip

Using the Python Package Index (PyPi), you can install scikit-rf using:

pip install scikit-rf

git

The bleeding-edge development version of scikit-rf may be installed from our github page. You can use git directly, or download a zipfile.

git clone git@github.com:scikit-rf/scikit-rf.git
cd scikit-rf
python setup.py install

Optional Modules

Some features of scikit-rf wont be available until you install additional modules. You can install these using conda or pip.

Instrument Control

To use the vi module, you must install all of its dependencies. This can be done with

$ pip install scikit-rf[vi]

which will install the following:

Warning about instrument communications

The above should be enough to communicate with many instruments. However, some of us have had difficult to resolve issues with certain instrument configurations that require particular setups. For example, to communicate with Keysight’s N5227B PNA over GPIB, we had to install the Keysight IO Libraries Suite

When using the virtual instrument module, you have the option of specifying the backend that PyVISA uses to communicate with instruments. By default, this is PyVISA-py, the fully Python VISA implementation, but in the case above with the Keysight Analyzer, we had to specify the exact .dll of the VISA driver. More information can be found here on VISA backends, but if you have issues, please submit a detailed bug report!

Excel file export

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