Greetings,
? ? ? ? ? ? IMHO the major advantages offered by the tinyVNA concept are handheld portability and cost. The instrument concept is ideal for many portable field measurement needs. Professional field portable, battery powered spectrum analyzers are typically ten to a hundred times more expensive - well beyond the budget limitations of the majority of hobbyists.
? ? ? ? ? Usually the measurement of modulation components can be done conveniently?without the need for handheld portability. With modern day DSP technology using computer muscle power all that is needed for the measurement of modulation components is an inexpensive SDR receiver along with a PC running freeware such as HDSDR. A nice, quite low cost combination is SDRPlay's RSP1A receiver running under their free accessory RSP Spectrum Analyser PC software. That combination offers spectrum analysis that has a professional feel to it with frequency coverage from VLF to UHF. With the selection of a 20KHz span the RSP SA resolution bandwidth can be reduced to less than 1 Hz.
? ? ? ? ?But the relative downside of using an SDR receiver as an analyzer is that it needs to be tethered to a PC thus it does not offer a nearly as portable a concept as the tinySA. The tinySA appears to provide sufficiently narrow resolution bandwidth capability to separate most signals which IMHO should make it a good fit for many uses other than modulation component analysis.
Tom, VA7TA
