LTSpice: Complex numbers?

You probably can't get an Algebraic display like that, but you should be able to display, for example...

Real(V(1))

and

Imag(V(1)) ...Jim Thompson

So I asked this question on the Yahoo group (after finally getting past this dreaded captcha stuff), and the LTSpice-guru Helmut Sennewald had the answer:

Make the waveform window active. Left click on any number of the left vertical axis. Then select Cartesian instead of Bode or Nyquist. Representation: "Cartesian" When you now select a signal, LTspice will show the numbers for the real and imaginary part.

I had found that on the web yesterday but gave up because it did not work. Turns out it does not work in a transient analysis but it does in an AC analysis.

But doesn't that show them as separate numbers, not as A + jB ?? ...Jim Thompson

It shows them as:

A bit unorthodox but good enough for me. The nice thing is you can make them visible just by hovering over the spot of interest in the waveform window. I need this to corroborate the numbers my software will calculate.

Full confession: This stuff has been so long ago that I needed to brush up. And right now I am getting a complex impedance where there should only be a capacitance (sans real component). Hurumph!

I do a lot of impedance analysis, creating subcircuits to match wirebonds from DC up into the GHz range, so my AC skills are still quite well-honed ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Same here, but you know how it goes. Wet finger in the air, black cat crosses street, "Oh, need another 3nH here and 4pf over yonder", throw onto SPICE, find it's really 4nH and 5pF, put that in the design, done.

I have to extract the capacitance from a ref/sense ratio measurement and through a lossy LC network. No fun. One of our guys had a billiant idea: Give it to a college kid, let him/her solve it and pay $50 or whatever is fair for it. But that feels like cheating :-)