In Other News...https://www.immersionrc.com/fpv-products/rfpowermeter/I've had one of these for several years; it's pretty much essential gear for anyone serious about RC, and absolutely necessary if you fly FPV with other pilots. It was their first version; and as such, was a bit buggy. While they did a good job with the device itself, and the testimony of people a lot more knowledgeable than myself says that the meter is pretty accurate (this is a relative statement; but 0.1-5% of scale is probably right), there were some issues. Because of a poor choice in attenuators included with the device, accuracy in the now-critical 5.6-6.0GHz range was pretty much out to lunch thanks to poor absolute accuracy and steep VSWR Slope due to the atten operating right at the upper limits of its design.
I discovered this, and published to the RC community some pretty extensive testing which showed that with the substitution of a decent 18GHz Avionic-grade atten, results were much more linear and useful. As you might imagine, that revelation made a bit of a mess in some circles.
* My "hindsight is 20/20" assessment is that at the time they were designing the thing, 5.8GHz video was pretty new, so they expected the thing to be used primarily in the 1.2-2.4GHz range and testing at 5.8GHz was probably not as thorough as it could have been. However, as the device was more than accurate enough once upgraded with a decent atten, I considered the point moot and moved on with my life, so I never did acquire the expensive gear needed to test its absolute accuracy.
https://www.immersionrc.com/fpv-products/rfpwrv2/ - $79 "Introductory Pricing"
Fast-forward to today, and I find myself reading up on the v2; I'm planning to get back into FPV, and I've known they were going to release this new version for a while; it's been out almost a year now. I'm actually pretty impressed with what they've stuffed into this little thing; looks like they've incorporated some of the LaForge FPV VRX spectrum analyzer code, and according to the specs, the meter is calibrated at 35, 72, 433, 868, 915, 1200, & 2400MHz plus at 5600-6000MHz in 50MHz steps. Also interesting is that they've incorporated a CDC stack; you can actually do logging with this little beast.
So, hopefully, this version will be all that and a bag of chips; at $79 (!!!), it's also about half what my v1 cost. I have one on the way (Actually I got the RotorRiot version for the extra included adapters); should be here in a day or two.
What I wanna know now is... from all you RF HEADS out there... What testing dooya want me to do with it?Tell me what you want and how to set it up, and I'll do my best. I've attached the latest user manual as a .pdf; you can see specs & tech in there.
Cheers,
mnem
Where is the "kick eevBlog in the 'nads" button on my keyboard; I need it right now!!!
* (If you look at around 00:45 of this J. Bardwell vid, you'll see a brief mention of what I'm talking about, as well as an overview of the device aimed at RC/FPV enthusiasts and discussion with one of the IRC engineers)