What can it do?
- SWR The Antuino measures the SWR of the antenna with a narrowly tuned receiver. A simpler resistive bridge with a diode detector will pick up an stray RF like local broadcast, a nearby ham radio operator or harmonics to give a false reading. The Antuino uses dual crystal filters to provide very accurate SWR at the actual frequency of measurement.
- Field Strength Meter Attach a small piece of wire (small whip) to your Antuino’s RF IN port. Now, monitor the field strength of a transmitting antenna! It allows for quick and dirty measurement of front-to-back ratios, nulls and general Apples to Oranges comparisions of different antennas.
- Cable Loss Connect the RF cable between the RF IN and RF Out ports. Set Antuino to SNA mode and set to the frequency. Read the power level.
- RF Cable velocity Connect a short piece of wire between the RF IN and RF OUT ports. Solder A length of the cable under test at the junction. Choose SNA mode and plot the frequency response. A dip will give you an accurate reading of which frequency is a quarter-wave length of the cable’s length.
- Modulation meter The Antuino can pick up signals as low as -90 dbm in power mode. A small whip antenna connected to the Antuino will allow you to monitor your own signals. Tune up and down the frequency of your transmitter to measure the splatter from distortion.
- Signal Source The RF out port of the Antuino acts as a signal source (though with square waves). You can accurately tune it to any frequency from 10 Khz to 150 Mhz.
- Frequency Response By feeding the signal from RF-OUT into a device/circuit under test and measuring the response at the RF-IN port, you can effectively measure the circuit response at any frequency. Click on PLOT to see the frequenc response.
- Plot! By clicking on the PLOT button, you can plot the frequency response of your amplifier or filter. It is a little spectrum analyzer with a tracking generator.
- Hackable The entire Antuino circuit and the software are placed under GPL license on https://github.com/afarhan/antuinov2.1
- Battery operated Power your Antuino from 6 AA cells. With the low power monochrome display, your batteries will last a long time. The current consumption is 90 mA. A set of batteries will last hours of operation. But switch it off when not in use.
- The top line shows the current mode of operation (It is measuring SWR in the above picture).
- The second line is a meter and read-out. It is showing SWR of 17.4 as the Antuino is not connected to any antenna
- The third line shows the current frequency at which the readings are shown
- The fourth line is a choice of modes : SWR, Power meter, Scalar Network Analyzer. At the moment it is in SWR mode
- Below that is the span control where you control how large the plot is.
VIDEO
Antenna
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Software
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App - Mobile
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