Collaborate Disseminate
A dip meter is basically a coil of wire that, when you excite it, you can use to tell if something inside that coil is resonating along. This lets you …read more Continue reading Understand Your Tools: Finger Exercises
A staple of the radio amateur’s arsenal of test equipment in previous decades was the dip meter. This was a variable frequency oscillator whose coil would be placed near the …read more Continue reading A NanoVNA as a Dip Meter
[Kerry Wong], ever interested in trying out and tearing down electrical devices, demonstrates and examines the SV 6301a Handheld Vector Network Analyzer. He puts the machine through its paces, noting …read more Continue reading Vector Network Analyzer Demo and Teardown
Dipole antennas are easy, right? Just follow the formula, cut two pieces of wire, attach your feedline, and you’re on the air. But then again, maybe not. You’re always advised …read more Continue reading The Dipole Antenna Isn’t as Simple as it Appears
NFC tags are a frequent target for experimentation, whether simply by using an app on a mobile phone to interrogate or write to tags, by incorporating them in projects by …read more Continue reading NFC Performance: It’s All In The Antenna
Those of us who have bought cheap TinyVNA devices for our RF experimentation will be used to the calibration procedure involving short-circuit, 50 Ω, and open terminations, followed by a …read more Continue reading Calibrating a VNA The Proper Way
There was a time when a Vector Network Analyser or VNA was the type of instrument that cost as much as a very fancy car or even a small house. …read more Continue reading LibreVNA Is A Quality Open Hardware Vector Network Analyser
We live in a good time to be an electronics geek. It used to be only the richest or shrewdest among us had a really good oscilloscope, while these days it is entirely feasible to have a scope that would have cost a fortune a few decades ago, a logic …read more
It’s never too late in life for new experiences, but there’s a new experience I had a few weeks ago that I wasn’t expecting. I probably received my first piece of test equipment – a multimeter – in the early 1980s, and since then every time I’ve received a new …read more
When [Jephthai] wanted to build his own Yagi antenna, he turned to MMANA software for antenna modeling. This is an antenna analysis program that uses the moment method to calculate parameters for different antenna geometries. After building the Yagi, the predicted tuning and impedance matched the real antenna nicely. But …read more