Testing HT antenna SWR w/NanoVNA.

[TNFrank]

I got my NanoVNA H2 in today and was planning on doing a video on antenna swril with the antennas I have. I'd originally planned on doing a 401 node sweep of from 120MHz to 470MHz then see where each antenna worked best between that range. Now I'm thinking I should break each range up by Band(2M, 1.25M, MURS, 70cm, and GMRS)to get more accurate readings. Does that sound about right?

I'm curious to see which antennas are more limited to some frequencies and which word on a broader spectrum. Should be a fun experiment and make for an interesting video.  

[TerriKennedy]

6 hours ago, TNFrank said:

I got my NanoVNA H2 in today and was planning on doing a video on antenna swril with the antennas I have. I'd originally planned on doing a 401 node sweep of from 120MHz to 470MHz then see where each antenna worked best between that range. Now I'm thinking I should break each range up by Band(2M, 1.25M, MURS, 70cm, and GMRS)to get more accurate readings. Does that sound about right?

I'm curious to see which antennas are more limited to some frequencies and which word on a broader spectrum. Should be a fun experiment and make for an interesting video.  

This is a thankless task with handheld antennas. There's way too much interaction with the HT and your body to do any real-world analysis.

I set up a test rig for this, but decided that it wasn't worthwhile testing antennas beyond a "probably good / probably fake" check on their factory tuning.

My setup is a 36" diameter aluminum disc with a hole in the center with a mating SMA-M connector and  25' of RG316 coax. The disc is supported off the (concrete) floor with three 3" Teflon cubes (which I had laying around). These components are inside a shielded, un-powered building. The other end of the coax runs through a building penetration to a NanoVNA H4. The NanoVNA is connected to a laptop PC via a USB cable with ferrites at each end, and the laptop PC is running on battery power to avoid coupling AC line noise into the NanoVNA or antenna line.

This gives me nice, repeatable readings which have little to no relevance in the real world.