Electronic CAD - Which is the best value?

There are many other low cost options.

I use and strongly recommend EasyPC from Number 1 systems.

It's cheap and above all simple. No good for ultra fast wiggly impedance and ns matched tracks but OK for most other stuff.

Another cheapo (and some versions free) one I've just heard of is DipTrace.

I'd be ultra cautious about a very low cost "introductory" type offer on an expensive system like Ordcad. I know people who seem happy with Orcad but for me it's way too complicated in ways that make the tool get between you and the job.

Don't  be misled by PCB systems that offer built in simulation LtSpice (from AD) or SuperSpice are free. I've never found the integration of a simulator with the pcb tool to be worth anything at all - because you almost never want to simulate the pcb but an aspect of it.

MK

There are many other low cost options.

I use and strongly recommend EasyPC from Number 1 systems.

It's cheap and above all simple. No good for ultra fast wiggly impedance and ns matched tracks but OK for most other stuff.

Another cheapo (and some versions free) one I've just heard of is DipTrace.

I'd be ultra cautious about a very low cost "introductory" type offer on an expensive system like Ordcad. I know people who seem happy with Orcad but for me it's way too complicated in ways that make the tool get between you and the job.

Don't  be misled by PCB systems that offer built in simulation LtSpice (from AD) or SuperSpice are free. I've never found the integration of a simulator with the pcb tool to be worth anything at all - because you almost never want to simulate the pcb but an aspect of it.

MK

michaelkellett said:

Don't  be misled by PCB systems that offer built in simulation LtSpice (from AD) or SuperSpice are free. I've never found the integration of a simulator with the pcb tool to be worth anything at all - because you almost never want to simulate the pcb but an aspect of it.

I've tried to use that too. There is an advantage, that you can reuse your schematic drawing expertise in the CAD tool to draw the design-to-be-simulated.
That said - I've never used it beyond trying it out. I use LTSpice for simulation (and need to get better at it).

Just to add to the simulation ideas, Multisim is pretty easy-to-use for simulation, it tries to show things during execution-time, i.e. allows the user to watch behavior as the simulation runs in short time-bursts that make it look real-time even though it isn't, rather than execute the entire simulation and then observe the recorded results after the simulation completes. It's pricey (typical of NI), but a low-cost way is if you have young family-members (doesn't need to be son/daughter from what I can tell, can be extended family, of school-going age) and then there is a discount. I used that to simulate large chunks of an SDR project I worked on a while back (even though it's not really designed for RF stuff).

An example of Multisim in use (this is a slide from a talk I was supposed to give to some Amateur Radio people at some point, so I had it pre-prepared).

The red and yellow blobs on the schematic are just graphics I added to show where the red and yellow output on the oscilloscope view came from (it's showing frequency conversion from the mixer). On the left you can see the divide-by-4 and quadrature signal generation.