Thanks, Jim! That's good information, I'll look into it! Thanks!
Most of my VNA work in recent years was in the design, tuning and matching of embedded antennas for 900 MHz, 1.4 GHz and 2.5 GHz for electricity, gas and water meters home-area networks and personal security devices. I mostly used a little Smith Chart program called WinSmith 2.0 that was sufficient for my tasks. Those programs you have listed sound interesting, indeed! I'll check 'em out! Many thanks! 73, Charlie, K4OTV -----Original Message----- From: Topband [mailto:topband-boun...@contesting.com] On Behalf Of Jim Brown Sent: Wednesday, March 05, 2014 12:25 AM To: topband@contesting.com Subject: Re: Topband: New MFJ 259C available On 3/4/2014 7:04 PM, Charlie Cunningham wrote: > I'd also like to be able to apply VNA measurements to some of my HF antennas > and I might be willing to take a laptop out there to do that, but I could > also just calibrate out the feedline to move the measurement plane out to > the antenna and do the measurments from indoors! Would be nice to have the > capability! Charlie, Virtually all of the major vector analyzers can write impedance data files in a standard plain text format (called Touchstone) that can be imported by modeling programs like SimSmith. They also allow you to do TDR of the system, so you can subtract out the feedline. From there you can design matching networks. There's a piece on my website that lists several decent analyzers, then shows you to use SimSmith to do these things. SimSmith is FREE, and runs in Java. Dan, AC6LA, has some wonderful Excel spreadsheets that work with this data. One of them will take open circuit and short circuit sweeps for a piece of transmission line and compute Zo, Vf, and attenuation vs frequency. Most of his spreadsheets are free. Dan also sells a spreadsheet that automates EZNEC and, I think, will do optimization. 73, Jim K9YC _________________ Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband _________________ Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband