I cannot express to you how excited I am about this thing. Unfortunately I have a grand total of zero N type connectors or devices that have N type connectors on them. Fortunately Rig Expert provides an N to SO-239 adapter. I can get from SO-239 to pretty much anything else I might need.
An example of what you can see with a Rig Expert.
Strangely upon getting this thing I had a heck of a time getting it to give me a legit measurement. For some reason I kept getting an infinite measurement. The first thing I wanted to test was my dummy load. No luck. Then I decided I wanted to see what the Smith Chart looked like on some conventional Transformers I had built some time ago. I know that the inductance checked out on the windings, but I had never had a measurement device capable of showing me if it actually worked. So I found a 200 Ohm resistor to test my 4:1 conventional transformer. This should give me a reading pretty near 1:1 SWR.
Infinite.
Maybe I got a bad resistor. After wiggling things a bit and trying a new resistor. BAM. . . I have a reading. It checks out. I go on the the 2:1 transformer, etc. All tests come out showing that I did in fact make these things correctly!!
If you can read this, you will now know how bad the match is on my 630M antenna
The next thing I do is put the analyzer into the front end of the receiver I built so that I can peak the input filter to be right at 7 MHz. It turns out I was off by quite a bit! I made some adjustments and will have to get back to you on whether it makes a difference in receiving actual Amateur Radio frequencies.
I go on to measure my 630M antenna. I’ve known for a while that the phase of Voltage and current have not been right in sync so my tuning network was off a little. I had tuned it and thought I had it as close as I could with the scope match. Turns out as I had my rig expert attached I was able to get the waves in phase. YEAH! Unfortunately the magnitudes are not equal, but hey #firstworldproblems.
I plan on working on a better matching network for the 630M set up eventually. I would sure like it to take up a little less space and I would like to put a little more power into it. As it stands now my ERP is in the micro watt power level. It would be great if I could get to milliwatts. 🙂
OK. . . More things to measure. . . I will keep you all posted on what I find!
KF5RY
I’m a relatively new ham. Got my license, joined a club and I’m having fun! I enjoy CW, pedestrian mobile, backpacking, and I dream of building radios at some point. At present I have a wife and daughters so my building time is limited.