The Funkamateur design was improved upon by other radio amateurs around the world, including a Chinese amateur who produced the design I have on my bench.
#Anytune spectrum analyzer software#
The WinNWT and LinNWT software used by the original Funkamateur design came from, and was available from his website. The history is related by, and is a salutary tale of how cheaply cloned hardware can have unfortunate consequences. This product has caused something of a headache, we’d like to ask you don’t add to that if you use it.Hardware-wise all seems in order, but it’s a different tale on the software side. On the rear edge of the board is a micro-USB socket, a couple of LEDs, and a “Key” switch to enable the tracking oscillator, and on the front are a pair of SMA sockets for RF input and output. It’s reported as having a receive bandwidth in the region of 150 kHz, but I lack the instrumentation to measure that. On the board is an STM32F103 microcontroller that drives a pair of ADF4351 PLL frequency synthesisers for tracking and receive local oscillator respectively, an IAM-81008 receive mixer, and an AD8307 logarithmic amplifier to measure the received level. Its operation is surprisingly simple, in effect a very wideband radio receiver and signal source that can sequentially check signal levels across its range under the control of a microcomputer. How Much RF Test Equipment Hardware Does $30 Get you? It’s a design derived from one published in Germany’s Funkamateur (“amateur radio”) magazine early in the last decade, and unscrewing the end plate to slide out the board from its extruded enclosure we can see what makes it tick. I ordered one, along with an attenuator and RF bridge for SWR measurements, and after the usual wait for postage my anonymous grey package arrived and it was time to give it a look and consider its usefulness. We’ve already taken a look at the $50 VNA, and this time it’s the turn of the $30 spectrum analyser, in the form of a little device that I succumbed to while browsing Banggood. It has been available from all the usual outlets for a while now either as a bare PCB or in a metal box about the size of a pack of cards. The LTDZ spectrum analyser on the bench today covers 35 MHz to 4.4 GHz, and has a USB interface and tracking source. As mildly exotic silicon has become cheaper and the ingenuity of hardware hackers has been unleashed upon it, it’s inevitable that some once-unattainably expensive instruments will appear as cheap modules from China.
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