Thank you! After watching seemingly every NanoVNA RU-vid video over the last 2 years, (a LOT of them,) I was never advised of ANY of this very useful information! Again, thank you. Your channel is the best combination of detailed, practical, and expert technical information. I use what I've learned from your channel on a regular basis. I'm sure others do, too.
This is probably the most interesting way to use a vna for. I work with HF and its a real nightmare if you have undefined parameters in your komponents. This mesurments can be as essential as a simple voltage mesurment but it never get explaned so decendly. Thank you for this Video.
Thank you Fesz. Very usefull and clear explanation as always. Could you point it out limitations of vna measurements and why we use network analyzers with different impedance values if vna can measure even miliohms. I have Analog Discovery 2 or other more expensive alternative in mind. Thank you
Nice explanation. Maybe good to note the though the plot showing inductance and capacitance for a s21 measurement is missing, the calculations are there if you look at the marker data.
I've been wanting to buy a VNA for a long time but honestly the fear of not knowing how to use one has been a big part stopping me from buying it. Thanks for this amazing in-depth explanation video! I'd personally love if in the future you did similar videos of VNA's and testing components with them (capacitors, inductors, amplifier circuits, antenna's, etc.). There's practically no good videos on RU-vid of this subject.
Hey, thank you for this vid! Nice info there! Will be great to see more vids about usong LiteVNA to construct and then to tune different antennas like Dipole, Moxon, Yagi's.... Also will be nice to see hod does symetrisation(baluns) works, and different ways to measure parameters of coaxial cables and how to make and tune imedance matching circuits using VNA. Thanks in advance !)
I would add that a VNA is also able to measure S12 & S22 parameters by reversing port1 and port2. If done for an active device (LNA, MMIC, ...) be sure that the active device is stable (not self oscillating) and linear (no C class power amp !). Please note that the 2nd link provided is not working (error 404).
Thanks for letting me know about the link; I found an updated version of it. Also the point you mentioned about the other Sparams as well as the type of active device to be measured are also valid and important! I may do a follow up at some point
Thanks for posting your videos are not always understandable But they are always appreciated please make your videos with more graphic and plane plane descriptions thanks for posting again
Excellent video, thanks. I'm watching it over and over and trying to understand the data format from the nanovnasaver file. That are the values under the columns of S, RI, R and 50? Where do I find the definitions?
@@FesZElectronics Thanks, that makes sense. I'll make an attempt to process that data in the spread sheet. I'm also looking more closely at nanoVNASaver and it seems it has graphs that do all the computations. I'll have to look more closely at that as well. Thanks for your really useful videos. Probably the clearest in this field on RU-vid.
@@FesZElectronics Ok, finally got the spreadsheet to work. Thanks. Just wondering if you can point me to a reference that describes how to compute, say, through gain measured from the s-parameters. I find pages that require S22, and S12, but clearly the nanoVNA doesn't have these values. How do we get those from the files generated by nanovnasaver?
S22 and S12 are the same as S21 and S11 just measured from the other side; S11 is reflected wave from port 1 back to port 1; S22 is reflected wave from port 2 back to port 2; if take the same circuit and swap the way in which its connected to the NanoVNA, even thought the values will be saved as S11 and S21, you can edit them and treat the results as S22 and S12 - port "1" and "2" is just a convention.
@@FesZElectronics Thanks for that explanation. My question was more about how the nanoVNA computes the S21 gain. Clearly when it sweeps and produces the graph it doesn't have the S22 and S12 values. Anyway I was able to recreate nanovnasaver graph of S21 gain in the spreadsheet by calculating the magnitude of the S21 value and then taking the 20 x log10 of the magnitude. I am left wondering how this compares to the more detailed calculations that require S22 and S12. Maybe you can make a video about all this? It would be of great interest. I certainly learned a lot in this process and can see what I still don't know :)
Thank you for this informative video. Your explanations are always so clear and easy to follow. If one would want to start tinkering with RF, what USB VNA options are there that would include 2.5GHz? I saw Pluto SDR and Libre VNA, but I don’t have the experience to choose.
