[TowerTalk] Antenna Analyzers

[Wes Stewart]

Rick,

With all due respect, I'm not terribly surprised with your comments, considering 
that you worked for HP. When I worked for Hughes, I remember several occasions 
where I took an airplane ride from Tucson to our sister facility in Conoga Park, 
CA just to use their network analyzer to measure something or the other.  It 
took me several years to get a capital equipment proposal approved by upper 
management to purchase an HP8510.  As I recall, with all of the ancillary 
equipment, software, cal kits, etc, the cost was in the neighborhood of 
$200,000.  And it was still buggy and did require support.

The VNWA software may not be as user friendly as you would like, but it's 
remarkably free.  As I said, it will run the FA-VA5 and I didn't mention it but 
it will even run the old N2PK.  There are automatic selection options for the 
clock multipliers.  I suspect that a request to Tom, might get an option to move 
the center frequency to the marker written into a revision.  (I'm not speaking 
for him.)

Wes  N7WS

On 12/5/2018 9:13 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist wrote:
>
>
> On 12/5/2018 7:21 AM, Wes Stewart wrote:
>
>> 2) Short of an HP-8510, 8753 or 3577 the gold standard for hobbyist use IMHO 
>> is the SDR-Kits, DG8SAQ designed VNWA. 
>> (https://www.sdr-kits.net/introducing-DG8SAQ-VNWA3) This is also a two-port 
>> vector analyzer. The VNWA software is *very* powerful, with a commensurate 
>> learning curve, and is well supported by the author Dr.Tom Baier as well as 
>> some very knowledgeable users.  A bit difficult to operate in the field 
>> because it's tethered to a computer, but I have done it.  This is a lab grade 
>> instrument. Uses SMA connectors.
>
> I would somewhat argue about the software being very powerful.
> Especially compared the the HP analyzers you mentioned.  It
> is not even close in terms of user productivity.  For example,
> AFAIK, there is no command to set the center frequency to the
> marker frequency.  The user would have to make a note of the
> marker frequency and then manually enter the new center
> frequency.  Just one of many limitations.  The user is also expected
> to set the multiplication factors for RF and LO depending on the
> measurement frequency.  This is very poorly documented.
>
> It is not clear if you can do full 2 port calibration.  This
> is probably covered under the learning curve comment.  If it
> is possible, it isn't obvious or straightforward.
>
> It is good that the VNWA is well supported but the HP analyzers you
> cited are intuitively obvious to use and don't require any
> support in most cases.
>
> (I have owned a VNWA for a few years).
>
> Rick N6RK
>