My experience as a ham operator and RF engineer has been that an affordable oscilloscope, signal generator, and receiver can perform the function of a network analyzer if needed; but most of our scopes don't go past 100 MHz and aren't useful at all above 50. I mean, HF is far more interesting *to me* than the top bands, don't get me wrong. But we need more cheap RF gear, especially for the expensive bands.
@@stickyfox, that's why longwave is so much fun. I can do everything with gear that is little more than high frequency audio equipment, build with 50 cent audio chips, and blanket a dozen states with a 10 mW ERP.
thank you for your videos, I have learned a lot from them. Are you planning to review rfexplorer? and perhaps something on how it works together with the rf signal generator.
The "mysterious" dip in the response to a single tone is known to this and other similar cheap devices. The dip occurs when the displayed mixed IF becomes zero or DC, which happens when the tone and the sweep frequency become equal during the sweep with the seond sweep generator on board. This is because towards the very low frequency mixing product (including DC) will not make through the detection highpass. Therefore calling this a spectrum analyzer seems a slightly false advertisement. Due to the simple design there is no way to get rid of it, which why real spectrum analyzers have multiple mixers and IF's. And yeah the resolution bandwidth is another story. The tracking generator outputs a square wave which has lots of harmonics, which do not interfere with the analyzer part. On second thought, I believe this could be corrected in software using a simple inverse (Wiener) filter together with the characteristics of the highpass in the detection path. Only the exact zero (DC) case would cause a singularity and needs interpolation which is simple. An inverse filter in hardware is a bit more challenging. I think there were some notes out on using steeper higher order LC filters, but they only make the notch narrower.
Very useful tool but starting at 35Mhz limits its use for the HAM's short wave bands or intermediate frequencies in the KHz ranges. I would have bought one of these if the lowest frequency was starting at 10-50khz ... There is the "Ultra" out there but without a TG... Great video as all your other videos are! Tnx for taking the time to share these reviews...
@@thereare4lights137 yes they overlap. I meant the usefulness of both instruments are limited due to their range. Of course if you have both you could work around that.
I think the tinysa is despite the limited range infinitely more useful, for a start it has a very dedicated developer (erik kaashoek) who has been adding features and resolving bugs and problems with it relentlessly, it is despite its limited hardware very capable and for a radio enthousiast very useful, there is a reason it is so popular. On the other hand there are a ton of these cheap chinesium spectrum analyzer out there and they all are not very useful because the hardware is just to limited, limited rbw, limited on the low side freq., limited accuracy, limited software, limited support and much more. going on the typical 35 mhz to 4 ghz they all use more or less the same hardware chips from analogue devices and so are all equally useless and all have the same bad written and maintained software.
now I can tune my antenna's, on the cheap! story of my life...the mountains R so challenging 4 uhf com's...but then again, mountains R hard 2 move! right...
Another You-tuber, Tony Albus, reviewed very similar (LTDZ 35-4400M) spectrum analyzer in May 2020, but without a builtin display for $55.99, $213 for 5 inch, micro display it’s a lot :)
@@marko.692 Is that like the one recently reviewed by IMSAI Guy that sells for ~$70 on Amazon? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eUdoqAQBf2A.html
