Thursday, March 29, 2007

AntennaSmith first impressions

The TZ-900 AntennaSmith arrived today. My first impressions of the unit can be summed up as wow!
I only played with it for about a half hour this evening but the results were very pleasing. Here's what I did: I set up a Buddipole right in the middle of the living room, hooked up the analyzer, and turned it on. It immediately plotted from 1 MHz to 30 MHz the SWR for the antenna. You can see the trough of green where the SWR is less than 2:1. Nice.
There are four buttons on the side of the unit to select features and change options. These buttons are labeled by notations on the right side of the screen. It all made sense to me. After going through all the different plots, changing the range of the frequency sweep, walking through the points plotted in the Smith chart, and playing with some other features, I realized that I'd not even opened the manual yet! In fact, at this point at least, I can't even tell you if the manual is any good because I've barely skimmed it!
The unit is smaller, lighter, and easier to work than my trusty MFJ-259B. I will try to take a picture of the two units side-by-side for comparison this weekend.
I was nervous about this purchase. It was big bucks and could have been a big disappointment... or a disaster. It was neither. I am very pleased so far.
Obviously, first impressions are just that. I'll have much more to say once I have experience with the unit. And, of course, I'll post that here.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Off topic but:
Make a Telegraph that clacks out RSS Feeds
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/03/how_to_make_a_telegraph_t.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

March 30, 2007 8:26 AM  

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