Excellent use of the NANO's. I have gone to including one of the NANOVNA's
in our standard (electronic) camping equipment. They are invaluable in any
portable setup.
Dave - W?LEV
On Sat, Oct 15, 2022 at 3:20 AM Connie Stillinger via groups.io <stillinger=
[email protected]> wrote:
On Fri, Oct 14, 2022 at 09:53 AM, W0LEV wrote:
At HF (1.8 through 30 MHz) the influence of adaptors is pretty minimal.
Above that, yes, you need to cal. with the adaptors and the appropriate
cal. kit(s). This should not be considered a 1 or 0 hard wall, but
rather
"fuzzy".
Dave - W?LEV
This is an enormously useful insight for my use case. With this
information, along with some of the other tips here, I spent several hours
this afternoon with my NanoVNA and my portable adjustable coil vertical HF
antenna in the back yard. (Wolf River coils Silver Bullet if anyone is
interested.) It makes sense that adapters are pretty small compared to
wavelength for HF so for road-trip ham radio use cases their effect can be
ignored.
With an adaptor and the knowledge that I could relax about it, I was able
to pretty easily and quickly adjust my antenna to be tuned pretty well on
10m, 20m, 40m. In all cases I was able to get ~0j and a low SWR.
Good enough to get a bunch of QSOs from California across the country on
20 watts, including my first NJ contact.
My radio does have a built-in SWR meter and antenna tuner but I don't
like the way it sweeps the frequencies with a couple of watts, which is
basically a transmission. Also SWR is not a great measure of what I
really want from my antenna -- which is resonance, namely no reactance at
the frequency of interest, as several people pointed out. By adjusting my
antenna with the NanoVNA I can get great results for portable ham operation
without using the tuner in my radio.
--
*Dave - W?LEV*
*Just Let Darwin Work*
--
Dave - W?LEV
