Practical Tips on SEAMCAT:

Although the current SEAMCAT-3 release has been thoroughly tested, still some residual bugs may show up.

Therefore you are invited to apply certain care when using software in your scenarios and double check the simulation results, following simple usage tips outlined below:

  1. Always check whether the graphical plot of scenario during simulations corresponds to what was intended. However note that scenario elements are plotted following certain sequence, i.e. Wanted Transmitter is always positioned at point 0,0 and positions of all other elements are worked out starting from it, this will in particular have impact on how you see the circularly positioned elements.

  2. For non-CDMA scenarios, it is a good idea to first run the simulations on SEAMCAT-2, note the results, export scenario, import it to SEAMCAT-3 using the “Import legacy scenario” function, run the simulations and compare the results with those obtained with version 2. However note that in some instances it was shown that SEAMCAT-3 was more precise than SEAMCAT-2, therefore difference does not necessarily mean that SEAMCAT-3 simulations are wrong, but it should trigger an extra attention (e.g. manual calculation to verify the expected range of the results)

  3. For complex scenarios (e.g. using many randomly generated parameters, involving multiple interferers, etc), it is advisable to start from simplified scenarios (e.g. with fixed positions/powers of all transceivers), if possible check the results against manual calculations, and then work on gradually introducing new variables or elements into scenario one-by-one and see whether introduced variations lead to expected change tendency of the results.

  4. For CDMA simulations you may use the previously described approach of gradually increasing complexity of scenarios, but in addition it could be a good idea to create some extreme conditions (e.g. setting very insignificant or very powerful interferer to see whether zero-impact or full black-out of the victim CDMA system occurs when/as expected, and so on).

  5. For all kinds of scenarios, it is also advisable to at first run your scenario in debug mode (selectable from Simulation control menu) and then review the intermediate results of calculations in the generated log file.