The NanoVNA is more than just a fancy SWR meter for checking your antenna. Its much more and a very useful tool for the home brewer building amps and filters and the like. Now i have been buying things like crazy for various projects that I would like to build in the future. Often these parts are spec’ed for bands not of interest to me. So what do you do? Well you measure them at the frequency of interest and see how they work yourself.
Below is a MMIC amplifier part that I found for really cheap. By cheap I am talking in the 40 cents per range, so i bought 100 of them. I mean why not, they are spec’ed for 100mhz to 3gig with +30db of gain. Worst case senario they are kind of useless at HF and I will have parts for when I actually want to build things at VHF and up.
So anyway I had a test board built with 4 different circuits on it for testing out various parts I have here and it includes Op Amp, Mosfet and BJT amp circuits. So i decided to start with the MMIC and see what it can do.
The good thing about MMIC gain blocks is the fact that they have such a low parts count. 2 blocking caps an inductor, bypass cap and gain setting resistor. Initially i set the bias resistor a little to high and was getting a lot of distortion, so I halved the value and boom it was providing 24dB of gain at 7MHz, which is my go to frequency for all these sorts of tests. Next though, I wanted to see how the gain bandwidth was. My bandwidth of interest is HF so 3 to 30MHz, so just for shits and giggles I measures it out to the 6m band.
The test setup was Port 1 of the NanoVNA to the input of the test board, the output of the test board to the RF Sampler i made the other day, which was also connected to a dummyload and then back to Port 2 of the VNA. Then an sweep of was performed and the S21 Gain was measured.
Things actually looked quite nice and rather flat. A few dB down at 80m and 1 dB down at 6m. That is pretty good for a part with a minimum frequency of 100MHz. So all in all, this part is a winner and something I can use in a project sometime soon.
