[ANN] scikit-rf version 0.24.0

[Julien Hillairet]

Dear scikit-rf users,

On the behalf of scikit-rf contributors, it is my pleasure to announce the release of the new version 0.24.0. The version 0.24 of scikit-rf includes a lot of improvements (such as speed improvements) and bug fixes.

Note that this version officially drops the support for Python 3.6. The minimum required python version is thus now Python 3.7.

The detailed list of changes can be found below.

Best regards,

Julien Hillairet

Improvements and new features

• Improvement of the accuracy of the OpenShort and ShortOpen de-embedding by @keikawa in #739.
• (Huge) Speed improvement in the s2s function, particularly useful when working with large matrices (>300 ports), by avoiding unnecessary conversion of S-matrix definition by @qmfrf in #738
• Fix and Update methods in the virtual instrument module which called deprecated pyvisa methods by @cafeclimber in #409
• New time-domain gating implementation using time-domain multiplication instead of frequency-domain convolution. This gives a speed benefit of multiple orders of magnitude, depending on the number of samples by @Vinc0110 in #735
• read_all now sort files by default, to obtain a reproducible behaviour, by @xafra in #746
• Important speed improvement in network_2_dataframe by @stevehamblin in #761
• Make vector fitting Spice output compatible to LTSpice by @FranzForstmayr in #760
• Added a new operator >> for 4-port network cascading with reversed indexing ("1=>2/3=>4" instead than "1=>3/2=>4") by @capn-freako in https://github.com/scikit

Documentation

• IEEEP370 : add a warning in the docstring to inform matlab users of the differences compared to matlab original implementation. The differences are: i) FIX-2 is flipped and ii) better root choice solution to avoid 180° phase jumps in certain circumstances (NZC methods only) by @mhuser in #781
• Updates the documentation to highlight importance of different offset and port impedances, followed by 3 usage examples, close #754. by @biergaizi in #779
• Fixing typo and reference in Qfactor example by @jhillairet in #767

Bug Fixes

• Fix plot_s_polar() for matplotlib version >=3.6 (#762) by @Vinc0110 in #765
• Vector Fitting: bugfix for data including dc samples by @Vinc0110 in #768

Code Quality Improvements and Continuous Integration

An important work has been made by @FranzForstmayr to improve the code quality and to move the codebase to follow the PEP 0621:

• Move requirements specification to PEP 0621 by @FranzForstmayr in #752
• Create codeql.yml by @FranzForstmayr in #772
• Treat all warnings in tests as errors by @FranzForstmayr in #771
• Try to fix rtd build by @FranzForstmayr in #775
• use pyupgrade for python3.7+ by @FranzForstmayr in #776

New Contributors

We are very happy to welcome new contributors to the project (thank you!):

• @qmfrf made their first contribution in #738
• @cafeclimber made their first contribution in #409
• @capn-freako made their first contribution in #747

Full Changelog: v0.23.1...v0.24.0