Spectrum Analyzer Buyer’s Guide

Having a scope in a home lab used to be a real luxury, but these days, its fairly common for the home gamer to have a sophisticated storage scope (or two) hanging around. Dedicated spectrum analyze…

Putting The Magic Smoke Back Into A Dodgy Spectrum Analyzer

The trouble with fixing electronics is that most devices are just black boxes — literally. Tear it down, look inside, but it usually doesn’t matter — all you see are black epoxy b…

A Low-Noise Amplifier To Quantify Resistor Noise

Noise is all around us, and while acoustic noise is easy to spot using our ears, electronic noise is far harder to quantify even with the right instruments. A spectrum analyzer is the most convenie…

Clever Test Rig Clarifies Capacitor Rules-of-Thumb

If you’ve done any amount of electronic design work, you’ll be familiar with the need for decoupling capacitors. Sometimes a chip’s datasheet will tell you exactly what kind of ca…

Inspect The RF Realm With Augmented Reality

Intellectually, we all know that we exist in a complex soup of RF energy. Cellular, WiFi, TV, public service radio, radar, ISM-band transmissions from everything from thermometers to garage door op…

Near Field EMI Probes: Any Good?

[Learnelectronics] purchased some near-field EMI probes for his tiny spectrum analyzer for about $5 on sale. Could they be any good at that price? Watch the video below and find out. The probes arr…

Say The Magic Word, And The TinySA Goes Ultra

We’ve looked at the TinySA spectrum analyzer in the past. However, the recent Ultra edition offers an increase in range from 800 MHz to 6 GHz. How does it work? [IMSAI Guy] tells us in a rece…

Balancing A Motor With An Oscilloscope

With all things in life, one must seek to achieve balance. That may sound a little like New Age woo-woo, but if you think it’s not literally true, just try tolerating a washing machine with a…

Character VFD Becomes Spectrum Analyzer

These days, streaming services are a great way to listen to music or podcasts on your computer or on the go. However, they lack one feature of the MP3 players and streamers of old: visualizations! …

Big Audio Visualizer Pumps With The Music

A spectrum analyzer is a great way to create exciting visuals that pulse in time with music. [pyrograf] wanted a big one as a display piece, so set about whipping up something of their very own. An…

Pluto Spectrum Analyzer Uses Command Line

If you don’t care about shortwave frequencies, the PlutoSDR is a great deal. The device is supposed to be an evaluation board for Analog Device’s radio chips, but it does great as a sof…