Well, I decided to do like everybody and bought a NanoVNA
Ordered the SAA-2N which is a NanoVNA V2 made by Hugen with a 4" screen, metal enclosure, internal battery and Type N connectors. I decided to go with this one because of the nice Type N connectors and the supposed high quality of the calibration standards.
I was definitely not disappointed with the connectors, standards and cables. Cables are really good quality and connectors feel really good.
So first test, this is a 2.4GHz band-pass filter.
For comparison the same filter but measured with the AdalmPluto + Satsagen
Now I could show you how it could be used to do more boring RF stuff, but decided to show you something a little bit different. Can it be used as a LCR meter ?
So, first thing first, the the NanoVNA need to be calibrated. I added some adaptors and came up with my own ghetto calibration standards
first, Open calibration.
Now Short.
Load
and finally through.
And now some capacitors measurement. All capacitors were measured at frequencies 10kHz to 1MHz in a series arrangement. The NanoVNA V2 can be set to 10kHz but results are kind of flaky under 30kHz.
The first one is a 10nF cap. On my real LCR meter, this cap read 10.03 nF at 100kHz. I get around 10.233 nF on the NanoVNA.
Now 100nF. This one should be around 102.11 nF at 100kHz. 101.36 nF with the NanoVNA.
Finally 1uF cap. Reading 847.22 nF at 100kHz on the real LCR meter. 738 nF on the NanoVNA.
Conclusion, it's working relatively well on the nF range. And it's really interesting to see the capacitance changing over frequency. When you reach 1uF the frequency is too high and the result are not super accurate. I also tried in the pF range but I think my calibration setup is failing me and it was not super conclusive.