NanoVNA: Low-cost handheld 4GHz vector network analyzer

Make sure you read the &quot;beware of clones&quot; section carefully. There are some real shysters out there. Even the official UK reseller of the &quot;lesser&quot; sub 1GHz NanoVNA has been caught shipping cloned crap that doesn&#x27;t even pass self test or work properly on multiple occasions.<p>On to more optimistic things: these are really good. My neighbour is fairly deaf and has her television obnoxiously loud watching snooker until gone midnight. I asked her politely to turn it down before and was told to fuck off. So as it&#x27;s on digital terrestrial broadcast TV and we have a shared antenna, I looked up the channel and frequency and set up a fairly narrow band sweep across it and connected the NanoVNA to my TV feed line. She got fed up after about 5 minutes of it cutting out every couple of seconds and turned her TV off.<p>That&#x27;s not what I bought it for but that has been my favourite use so far. I originally purchased it to test some 70cm HT antennas.

I love my NanoVNA. I used it to tune my 6 band fan dipole. That took a lot of tuning! It works fantastically, and I&#x27;ve made contacts from the UK to Australia with it.<p>I&#x27;ve also used it for measuring the resonance frequency of tuned circuits and even as an RF signal generator.<p>Every radio amateur should have one! In fact if you are into any sort of radio it is useful. I also used mine to investigate the quality of various WiFi antennas to see if they were resonant in the right places.

Having this device in college when I was doing E&amp;M would have been an absolute game changer. The closest thing that existed was an MFJ antenna tuner for Ham Radio that only measured S11 at one frequency, and cost around $500. The next step up was to buy used equipment, which was four figures or more. Having something that goes to 1 GHz, does both S11 and S21, and only costs $50? Unreal.<p>Having used a modern VNA, the NanoVNA would feel cramped now... but still: E&amp;M would have been so much easier to understand with one of these, and a few labs.

Also see the TinySA <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinysa.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinysa.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;</a> and DSO Nano: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seeedstudio.com&#x2F;DSO-Nano-v3.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seeedstudio.com&#x2F;DSO-Nano-v3.html</a> to complete your mini homebrew electronics and radio lab.

A coworker was just showing me his the other night. We pitted it against a much more expensive network analyzer to see how it did and it was quite impressive, especially considering the price and size, and was definitely serviceable for amateur and student use. It&#x27;s a seriously exciting device.

I find incredible a product like this is in the market, where the minimal price to pay for a similar professional device is around $4000, maybe a couple thousands for lower end models.<p>Of course the accuracy of this device might be a lot less than those professional devices, but when you are a ham amateur hobbyist who want to know if some transceiver, antenna, cables, or other devices are working good, you get a lot of &quot;device&quot; for such a low price.

In ELI5 terms:<p>What is a VNA?<p>What are some exemplary, common things I could do with it?

In 2016 a low end, non-pro 100 KHz - 4 GHz VNA cost me $430. I thought that was a game changing deal back then: being able to buy a <i>new</i> working VNA for under $1000. While the NanoVNA&#x27;s aren&#x27;t even quite the quality of even my lowend pocketVNA they do give you a qualitative picture of what&#x27;s going on for $50. That&#x27;s a real game changer.

Whats the difference between the pro and normal version (apart fr 100$}.

It&#x27;s a shame there are not very many devices working in audio range (sub 100khz). You still have to scout eBay for a device from the 80s-90s and they are still expensive as hell.

I was using one of these to prototype a wireless fencing system, it was a real godsend. The refresh rate wasn&#x27;t good enough but it showed the concept worked good enough that I&#x27;m aiming to get a prototype together.

So does it do 4 billion measurements per second, or 8 to accurately measure a 4GHz signal?

I ended up buying a xaxavna which work similarly but seems to have better measurements

So what&#x27;s the deal with the name &quot;NanoVNA&quot; being applied to like a dozen unrelated projects now?