Pico Technology PicoVNA 108 8.5GHz Vector Network Analyser

New from Pico Technology, the market leaders in USB oscilloscopes, a professional-grade, low-cost 8.5GHz VNA for both lab and field use. With all these advantages, the PicoVNA is ideal for field service, installation test and classroom applications. Its remote automation interface extends its use to applications such as:

• Electronics component, assembly and system, and interface/interconnect ATE (cable, PCB and wireless)
• Material, geological, life-science and food science tissue imaging or penetrating scan and radar applications
• Inspection, test, characterisation or calibration in the manufacture, distribution and service center industries
• Broadband cable and harness test at manufacture, installation and fault over life
• Antenna matching and tuning

The PicoVNA offers exceptional dynamic range of 124 dB and only 0.006 dB RMS trace noise at its maximum operating bandwidth of 140 kHz. It can also gather all four s-parameters at every frequency point in just 182 µs; in other words a 201 point 2-port .s2p Touchstone file in less than 100 µs. The cost is so low that the PicoVNA could even be used as a cost-effective high-dynamic-range scalar network analyser! It's affordable in the classroom, small business and even amateur workshop, yet capable in the microwave expert's laboratory.

Making vector network analysis accessible

Today's microwave measuring instruments need to be straightforward, accurate, portable and affordable. No longer restricted to specialists, they are now used by scientists, educators, surveyors, inspectors, engineers and technicians in radio and gigabit data applications. Now Pico Technology has applied its expertise in microwave sampling oscilloscopes and time domain transmission and reflectometry to bring you a USB vector network analyser.

The PicoVNA is a professional USB-controlled, laboratory grade vector network instrument of unprecedented performance, portability and affordability. Despite its small size and low cost, the instrument boasts a ‘Quad RX’ four-receiver architecture to eliminate the uncorrectable errors, delays and fragility of three-receiver designs with internal transfer switches. 

‘Quad RX’ four-receiver architecture
In a VNA a swept sine-wave signal source is used to sequentially stimulate the ports of the interconnect or device under test. The amplitude and phase of the resultant transmitted and reflected signals appearing at both VNA ports are then received and measured. To wholly characterise a 2-port device under test (DUT), six pairs of measurements need to be made: the amplitude and phase of the signal that was emitted from both ports, and the amplitude and phase of the signal that was received at both ports for each source. In practice this can be achieved with a reasonable degree of accuracy with a single source, a transfer switch and two receivers; the latter inputs being switched through a further pair of transfer switches. Alternatively three receivers can be used with an additional input transfer switch or, as in the PicoVNA, four receivers can be used. Using four receivers eliminates the receiver input transfer switch errors (chiefly leakage and crosstalk) that cannot be corrected. These residual errors are always present in two- and three-receiver architectures and lead to lower accuracy than that of the Quad RX design.