1998 continues to be a great year. We've made major improvements in PLS-CADD and SAPS and have continued adding clients. Engineers from the National Power Corporation of the Philippines recently completed training here in Madison with us and we would like to extend them a special welcome to the PLS community.
We have added three major features to PLS-CADD in the last few months. They are thermal rating, clearance to TIN and annotation. PLS-CADD now implements the IEEE 738-93 standard for rating lines. You can determine the conductor temperature for a current change, the static thermal rating and the transient (fault) rating for your lines. Clearance to TIN automatically determines the minimum distance from your conductors to your TIN. This is particularly useful when severe sidehills are present. Finally, annotation allows you to place text or draw lines on your plan, profile, or sheets view. You control text size, color and orientation all with the mouse! Several of our beta testers have declared that with annotation they no longer export their designs to CADD prior to plotting. In addition to these three major improvements, we have made dozens of minor ones like providing a graphical preview window for the user defined terrain import.
SAPS version 5 introduces a number of features that make SAPS an even better platform for analyzing structures and systems of structures. These include improved integration between preprocessor and analysis engine, multithreaded/multiprocessor analysis, significantly improved performance (30-600% faster!), and an enhanced report. These improvements will be integrated into our structure programs over the next year.
The current shipping versions of our software are as follows:
We have tested these versions of our software under Windows 98 and can confirm that everything functions normally. If you are interested in obtaining the current shipping release of any of our applications, please send us email at info@powline.com. As always, we welcome your suggestions and comments on our software.
Best Regards,
Staff of Power Line Systems, Inc.
