As mildly exotic silicon has become cheaper and the ingenuity of hardware hackers has been unleashed upon it, it’s inevitable that some once-unattainably expensive instruments will appear as cheap modules from China. The LTDZ spectrum analyser on the bench today covers 35 MHz to 4.4 GHz, and has a USB interface and tracking source. It has been available from all the usual outlets for a while now either as a bare PCB or in a metal box about the size of a pack of cards.

We’ve already taken a look at the $50 VNA, and this time it’s the turn of the $30 spectrum analyser, in the form of a little device that I succumbed to while browsing Banggood.

I ordered one, along with an attenuator and RF bridge for SWR measurements, and after the usual wait for postage my anonymous grey package arrived and it was time to give it a look and consider its usefulness. It’s a design derived from one published in Germany’s Funkamateur (“amateur radio”) magazine early in the last decade, and unscrewing the end plate to slide out the board from its extruded enclosure we can see what makes it tick. Continue reading “What Can A $30 USB Spectrum Analyser Do For Me?” →