Hi check it out. We've got a brand spanking new instrument for you. The Sigin SVA 1015 X Thank you very much signant for getting this to me. Um, it is just hit the market I think like today or yesterday or something like that or a couple of days ago.

by the time you see this video yes, it's a brand new Spectrum analyzer. But not only that, check it out. It's a spectrum. and Vector Network analyzer Yes, it's a VNA and Vnas are usually expensive.

Uh, bits of Kit designed for Vector network analysis and I won't go into all the details of Vnas and everything else. We'll just have a quick skim over this but there. Um, basically this I believe is the first really uh, lowcost Vector Network analyzer in your traditional um, you know Spectrum analyzer form factor like this and the retail price for this is $1,395 for 9 khz to 1.5 gig. uh Spectrum analyzer.

but although it says spectrum and Vector Network analyzer and the model number is SVA for Vector analyzer, that's actually optional. the vector Network analyzer. Hang on. just let me face pal.

D So although Siglin have released this cool new spectrum and Vector Network analyzer, the network analyzer is optional extra. It's another 609 smackers. so that puts it around about the 2 Grand figure could come under maybe under uh 2 Grand with the vector Network analyzer uh Street P Price perhaps I haven't uh seen those yet? So I don't know what their thinking is there I Mean you know they could have killed the market. Every ham radio operator on the planet would buy one of these if it for 1395.

it had the Vector Network analyzer build in. Anyway, it is very cool so we'll check it out now. Um, siget were actually going to release the Uh SSA 105x which was just the Spectrum analyzer version of this without the vector Network analyzer Hardware built into it I Guess they just depopulate the chips. we'll take a look at.

this is primarily going to be a tear down video so we'll check it out. Um, but at the last minute they actually decided against that and they're only releasing the Uh SVA model which is which has the Vector Network analyzer Hardware built in. So um, it's just a software upgrade. You pay your license.

Boom! You get your VNA plus other modulation stuff, demodulation stuff and other uh, cool stuff we'll take a quick look at. but uh anyway, it is only 1.5 gig. Um, whereas the Uh SSA 3000 model we looked at previously which this one is not replacing the 3000 model actually. Uh, the tracking gen was optional extra, but on this one the tracking generator is included.

But the new but the street prices these days of the 3000 model, the SSA 3000 is that it includes the track and generate as well for basically the same price as this. so you can basically choose between a spectrum analyzer only. Uh, but the SSA 3000 goes to 2.1 gig standard with optional 3.2 gig. I think it is whereas this new lower end model and it is lower end even though it's a vector Network analyzer um is only limited to 1.5 gig.

there is as far as I'm aware, no higher bandwidth option for this so you know, great for covering all the you know anything like hams and stuff want to do and things like that and uh, uh, Emi pre- compliance and all that sort of stuff. It should be plenty for that. but if you want the higher frequency, this baby isn't going to do it for you. So compared to the SSA 3000, uh, the phase noise of this thing practically ident itical um, but the noise floor isn't as good on this one.

this is -56 dbm where it compared to 161 dbm for the 3000 model. so it's got better Hardware in the 3000. So as we see in the tear down, we expect significant differences in the hardware. Well, it's you know, at least significant enough to affect the performance of this thing.

Speaking of which, I'll link in my tear down below for the Uh previous version of this the ,000 and I I'm going to Pat myself on the back here I think that's an absolutely brilliant tear down cuz I took a different approach to that one in that I took highres photos and then I did all the voice over and editing and zoomed in I drew block diagrams around that sort of stuff I may not go to the same. That was a lot of work so I may not go to the same amount of effort uh for this one. So definitely check out the previous video if you want to know how a uh Spectrum analyzer works at a block diagram PCB level cuz the previous video covers that really well. Oh, and the amplitude accuracy of this one isn't quite as good as the 3000 model.

Uh, this is plus - 1.2 DB compared to plus -7 So yeah, performance isn't as good, but hey, if you can get a cheap vector or a cheapish vector Network analyzer in your traditional Spectrum analyzer form factor. this could be a winner. This is a good move by Siglin. So as the basic Spectrum analyzer, it's basically an ident identical look and feel to the 3000 model.

It's all. the buttons are like practically. menus I believe are all going to be identical. Haven't fully checked it out menu for menu, but it's going to be pretty darn close to identical.

but um, a lot of extra functionality in this one. We can do a modulation analysis in here. uh I believe this one is actually fully uh, optioned up so we can do uh, you know, frequency shift, key in and uh, stuff like that so we can demodulate uh, signals and uh, it's it's got distance default uh stuff because we have this Vector Network analyzer uh capability sort of building this extra Hardware building that allows us to do like distance default. Fantastic.

And of course, what everyone's going to be excited about is the vector Network analyzer capability. And if we go in here and take a look log magnitude, we can do phase. we can do group delay. terrific stuff and we can do Smith charts.

Five different types of Smith charts won't go into them, but absolutely fantastic. I Mean you know, like like the hams are all getting all moist just watching this thinking about having one of these puppies. So not only your Smith charts but your polar uh plots as well. Absolutely fantastic.

Uh, linear and log mag. What else we got here? Um SWR ratio. Brilliant. And yes, it is only a two.

Port Uh, VNA Of course it's none of that Port rubbish that you'll pay you know, 20 $30,000 for or something like that. but you know, two ports more than good enough to do all sorts of, you know, antenna calibrations, and all sorts of stuff in your um RF field that there's probably a dozen applications that I wouldn't even know about cuz that's just not my field. Anyway, it does have uh, resolution bandwidth that can go all the way with LBJ down to one kilo one Hertz Trust me, you can get down there and it's got uh, optional Emi filtering as well. Once again, there's a whole bunch of options for this thing, including um RF uh field probes and stuff like that uh which you've seen in many of my uh, previous uh videos and all you know, a ton of options so you know, really, it is.

It's probably going to be an impressively priced bit of kit for uh Emi pre-compliance and all of uh, your low-end vector Network analog of stuff. Terrific. Anyway, it's identical to the 3,000 we've seen before. It's got a headphone Port USB We've got the tracking generator which comes standard which is fantastic RF input up to plus 30 dbm Max or 50 volts uh DC maximum which is uh, pretty generous uh reverse voltage maximum 50 volts DC on the tracking gen source and if we have a look at the back um standard uh ethernet Lan with uh remote uh web viewing and web browsing stuff like that um external 10m reference and we can get our 10m out.

Um, it's going to have a reasonable clock as I looked in the previous video. uh, the 3000 model actually had a better clock than the Ryo uh unit external trigger in and you Kensington lock and that's all she wrote Beauty feels like a solid bit of Kit and it does take a while to boot too. I don't know 20, 30 seconds or something. Not going to write home to my mom about it anyway I Forgot to mention yes it is all touchy fely touch scope um it is.

come on there we go. Whop, we can pop up this one little Annoying bug here. I Don't like you can pop up this menu but I can't get rid of it. How the hell do I get rid of it anyway? like direct buttons like screenshot and things like that really is quite cool.

but you don't have to use the uh touch functionality. if you don't want it, you can do it all with the uh, good old buttons. Speaking of which, the screen is very bright. I do actually have my uh studio lights on here, so if I turn those off, it's actually you know it really is quite, uh, nice.

The View angle on it going a bit low. um, going past the horizontal. Actually, sorry about that. if you go to the low angle like that, of course you lose some of your uh, graticule um and stuff like that.

So if you got it mounted high up on a bench, it's probably not the best thing. Um, you really have to be looking pretty much either straight on or sort of down at an angle. It's designed for bench use, like it's like standing or sitting in a bench and looking sort of sort of down onto it like that. Anyway, it is a nice big screen.

Uh, 10.1 in 1024x600. Anyway, let's do a tear down of this thing and it's obviously going to be, uh, significantly different to the SSA 3000 even though it looks like an identical unit. It's got a basic tracking generator, the same tracking generator, and the same RF input which is going to be near identical apart from the bandwidth uh, differences, but uh, topology wise and everything else. In fact, a lot of the Uh chips I'm going to assume that they're going to be very similar, so only a bandwidth difference, but because it's a vector Network analyzer.

it's got to actually and a two-port vector Network analyzer. It's got to actually tap off the magnitude and phase of the source output. It's got to be able to measure that and the magnitude and phase of the RF inputs. so it's got to have like a directional couplers built in to actually tap those signals off to get your phase and amplitude measurements, which allow all your vector Network analyz in Magic to happen.

So we expect significant differences from a traditional Uh Spectrum analyzer. Let's whip that open, shall we? Oh, that's satisfying, all right. Four screws there, two on the top. pretty traditional stuff.

should lift off. the flippy feed are okay and I do like the rubber baby buggy bumpers on the bottom. Come on, it's got to be a clip somewhere. Hang on there we go and of course can't see a damn thing.

Got to get all the shielding off a there no more trademarks, Siglent, rust, nothing. Anyway, got ourselves ahead of there all right. A few screws around the outside see if we're going to lift this puppy off. Looks like the power supply is going to come out.

We're in. We're in like Flyn and of course we expect our machined aluminium. uh, complete block for the Uh Spectrum analyzer section. uh, looks like we got a tracking Gen down there and stuff.

We'll have one of the uh, the directional couplers down in there, so that's looking pretty sweet and we've got ourselves separate little processor board here don't actually remember what the previous te down was going. Have to go watch my own video and we'll take a look inside the power supply, but we got a little piss fan there. Um I couldn't like it. There was a little bit of noise there, nothing really offensive.

um air flow directly over this which comes through the vent holes in the Uh power supply and also over the Uh Network analyzer. um itself? um or Spectrum analyzer. little heat on the power supply, but main power supply down in here? Well, somebody had fun didn't they with the sastic gun down in there? Wow. Check it out.

Um Lelon brand crap Lelon brand? uh main DC filter cap. but the secondary caps I Do believe they're Rubicon Jeez, that's all right. Not too shabby whatsoever. Nice.

anyway. Does look nice. well designed and laid out. so yeah, no worries.

They've got nice folded metal work down in there so no sharp burs to, uh cut the wires there. Speaking of which, these are really quite sharp. I think scratch myself on some of these. you got to be careful taking this apart.

Um yeah, there's no rust, but uh, they added extra bonus sharpness on there. That's a fairly decent power supply for a low-end uh thing you know, could have done a little bit better, but not much. uh the Earth terminal down there. No worries whatsoever.

Okay, if we have a look at the main board very significant uh differences from the Uh SSA 3000 model from a couple of years back. They've now put all the process and which used to be a Spartan 6 Fpga plus plus a TI applications proc processor. they've Consolidated which was on the main board around here um they've now Consolidated that onto a single plug-in da board and we've discussed is there's many advantages uh to this you could have like a standard processor uh, platform across your product ranges so they might be uh, doing something like that. um and also it, uh, it keeps the all the high layer count uh, stuff all on this much smaller board so it's a little bit uh, cheaper and easier to test and things like that.

really nothing doing at all apart from a Altera Max 2 uh CP in there so you know. Nothing hugely, uh, grunty or special. And of course the rest of it is just inside these blocks here which looks uh for all the world, like the same sort of configuration we saw in the SSA uh 3000 Series. But of course, it's going to be significantly different because it needs those directional Cers couplers or, however, they're uh, you know, tapping off the phase and magnitude for the ports and everything else to do that.

So you know. But apart from the Spectrum analyzer I mean here's your RF input is going to be over here. so this is your tracking gen. Um, but like the cable in all looks, you know, fairly identical to the SSA 3000.

So that's interesting. But as I said, a lot of the RF uh, CH Spectrum analyzer chain in here is going to be near identical. It'll be identical from a block diagram. uh, point of view.

You know the Adcs and other um stuff are probably all going to be the same and stuff like that cuz it's all digital if and all that, uh, sort of jazz. um, but you know, and this. the performance isn't quite as good and the bandwidth isn't as high as the SSA 3000. So I Expect, you know RF uh, component differences in there.

You can't leave your poor little watch crystal flapping around in the breeze like that. That's what the pad's there for. Solder it down, goodness sake! Well, hello. Mr Art.

There we go. We're going to have our transmit receiver now ground in there five pin header. That's some sort of uh, probably programming interface cuz these two look like different ones. But anyway.

uh, we can get in there and uh, tap off the uh, the boot loader and uh Jazz like that H and we can just get the boot loader there. No worries whatsoever. We' just got our serial interface adapter. Ground is pin one here and pin three is the 115k board.

Uh, serial output. We can tap that, use a terminal uh, program and dump it. Beauty So it turns out that we've got. the processor.

Looks like it's a Xylin, um, zinc, uh processor, um Cortex A9 and uh, it's I'll post in the code Down Below on the Eev blog forum and you can have a look for yourself. but yeah, it's all there. It's running a version of some flavor of Linux All right, let's have a look at the tracking generator here. as you, uh, saw, it's actually got uh, uh, two connectors here as opposed to the Uh 3000 model which only has the one.

of course, one of them. um, it presumably is going to be the Uh required VNA uh, measurement. Uh, aspect to that. It's interesting that they put it on a separate board.

You can tell by the Uh Mouse bites in here that it was actually part of the panel. um, the main PCB panel. So it was all assembled at the same time time by the same pick and place machine. All the components on here, but then it was actually snapped off and used as a separate module.

Now, there's no reason to do this electrically. Uh, really? Because like you know, we've got the cable coming over here. Okay, if you want to have one point of ground, but actually physically snapping out the board doesn't really gain you anything electrically. You could have just left the mouse bites connected and have your routed um Edge on there and Bobs your uncle.

Um, but but they've decided to take this out as break this out. uh, these tabs here and do it as a separate module. Presumably because this is probably uh, tested on a separate Uh test rig and it's just easier for them to do that than it is if it was. uh, still part of this one main PCB panel here.

and we've obviously got a JTAG header here for the max 2 uh PD there. It's probably just doing some uh, you know, glue, logic, housekeeping, something like that. I Don't think it's powerful enough to do any real processing. Otherwise, they would have used an Fpga instead of a uh, you know, just an old uh Altera Max 2 PD Anyway, and I like how they've numbered the screws here.

Number one actually takes them out from the shazzy. Um, then takes apart these so let's should just fall apart. Let's just take a look a beautiful gold PLA and look at that and got our distributed element filter of course. Nice little bow tie Arrangement there.

Okay, to make heads or tails of this, we're going to have have to, uh, compare it to the previous model to see what they've added. But of course it's got all your uh, classic, uh block based approach. Look at this and the signals pass between the individual blocks like that and they're all shielded. They've got the solder M removed or gold plated and you'll find that's matched under there.

They machine out the little slot so the signals go. You can see that signals just go between the individual blocks and that's how you Shield one section from the other. common as mud. You'll find this Uh technique used on virtually well, really any product, inspect your analyzer or not.

Um, that has any sort of, you know, uh, gigahertz range like RF stuff. Even down, you know, on the sub gigahertz range, you'd still do something like this and the bottom. let's take a look. Yep, not much at all.

Oh some extra chippies on there. double-sided load. They had to, uh, fit it in there, but the rest of it's just all bypassing and stuff. Okay for the rest of it.

take out all the number one screws and all the rest of the screws on the board and it should in theory lift out like that once you get those cables off up there. Beautiful look at that. There you go there. not much on the bottom as you'd expect, just some miscellaneous, uh, housekeeping stuff, some bypassing what we want.

It's all under here. so that is a really nice construction. I Like that how it all just comes apart in a block and and we've got our looks like our LCD driver board down. there.

is it? Nothing special. this ribbon coming over here? as for, uh, the rest of our front panel? uh, keypad and oh, what's that 3M stuff down in there? H Anyway, we're not too concerned with the rest of this. It's me. All right.

let's get ready for the rest of the RF porn. this should. Yep, it's going to lift off a lot more distributed element filters. Yeah, there we go.

Not a huge amount. Looks like we got some directional couplers down in here as we've seen on the previous design, but you can see the signal flow from the RF input here through the various sections like this around there. It's tapped off with that distributed element filter. which there you go there.

That's where it's I Suspect: That's where it's going back. Um, this one going over to there. so we're tapping off that which we probably didn't have in the uh, previous version. I suspect and you can just see flow through the various blocks and I've gone through it in quite some detail.

Um, on the previous one, it's like a 40 minute video or something like that just going through the architecture of a spectrum analyzer like this. but of course this has some V Well, it has two Port VNA capability as well. Um, so I'll probably just go through the differences here. Um, as always, highres tear down photos over on Evev blog.com if you want want to see for yourself.

and yes, well, let's have a look at the bottom. and yeah, just some housekeeping stuff, some bypassing, nothing hugely special. All right. So let's take a look at the main Spectrum analyzer board I've got the original SSA 3021 um X the Uh 2.1 gig 3 GHz Uh Spectrum analyzer the original model from a couple of years ago on the left and the new one, the SVA 20115 VNA on the right.

and I'll try and keep the left right thing going for the rest of this Uh video. And if you want a very detailed, in-depth look at how a spectrum analyzer, uh works on a block by block basis. as in, you know, signal comes in here and then it. You know signal goes down here like this and then it goes through the mixer and then like there's you know, a local oscillator and all that sort of stuff.

and then it goes through a mixer and a saw filter and blah blah blah blah blah and then the intermediate frequency comes out and goes in ADC all that sort of stuff. I've done it in the previous video. it goes for like half an hour or something. I walk you through each section I won't do that here.

Um for this VNA What I'm going to do is um, just have a look at the differences. So I've got a photo of the main board here. Now the VNA uh, the SVA 20115 I had to actually flip the board. so if the writing's back to front on the chips, you know why, Because they actually put the physical components on the other side effectively the other side of the board.

you can see that with the Um with the connector up. here. it's actually physically on the other side. so I just have to flip it so they match and you can see.

It's reasonably similar, but there are some differences. like presumably because it is lower frequency, it's 1.5 gig uh, maximum over here. Whereas this design is designed for Uh 2.1 and 3 gig, they've got I believe they got a 3 GHz model. So um, they're obviously looking for that lower frequency range and also uh to lower the cost as well cuz the uh this VNA is a lower cost product in terms of spectrum analyzer compared to the previous model.

So let's have a look. Okay, here's our RF input here. It goes through a 50 ohm attenuator here. This is all the same Now this is interesting.

The original one had a proper 20db attenuator. If you have a look in there, it's actually a ceramic little ceramic job like this. and uh, that was a switchable attenuator like you. You know you go into the menu option and you switch that and it enables that.

but the new one doesn't seem to have that and it's not on the bottom either. So I'm not sure if they even have like you know I can't get the detail on these chips. I'm not going to go into there, but uh, it looks like that's just like a driver or whatnot. Um, so I think what they're doing is they're actually doing the uh attenuation inside this.

what was a digital attenuator before? Over here? they actually use a different chip. Now they've got a Parag Grine uh semiconductor. and here's the data sheet for that. uh, Paragr Semiconductor.

um. attenuator here and that actually I think that's where they're doing all of the attenuation in there. So maybe this chip is like, you know, lower cost. They've refined the design.

it's a couple of years later, and uh, maybe if they made the 3000 model again, they might change back to this Parag Grine semiconductor part. I Don't know. all the performance isn't as good or whatever as the original 3000 model, but anyway. uh, apart from that, um, you know it's It's basically the same front end as you'd expect and then we've got a preamp here.

We've got a preamp over here I Don't know. I'm not going to bother looking at the part numbers, but it looks very similar arrangement with those two eight pin uh chips there and there and this little job here which is probably I don't know, is that just like a power supply, a local regulator or something like that? Uh, that's unsurprising. And then I've probably got all this detail in the original um, tear down of this Uh 3000 model I go into like detaile data sheets on each one of the chips anyway. then it flows down into the low pass filter which you can see here they've got it as a distributed element filter whereas over here they've decided Well we don't need this distributed ele filter.

rubbish. Um, we can just do this with our Um with our caps and our Um in inductors. whereas that's basically what they're doing over here. these circuit elements, right? These are inductors in here and these elements over here are capacitors and that's exactly what basically is happening over on this one.

Over here, we've got inductors and capacitors and that forms our um. low pass filter. Then it goes into the mixer. I Looks like the mixer might be.

it looks like it is a different part, but basically uh, the topology all going to be the same. The crazy thing about this is if you have a look on the right, they have actually changed the chip from the HMC 4, 48 to the HMC 213, but the HMC 213 is just as obsolete apparently as the original one used in the original. Why would you use an obsolete part in a new product? Now, the mixer is fed from this bow tie low pass filter here and they've got the same bow tie low pass filter over here. It's physically larger by the looks of it.

I mean the sizes of those boards are very similar, but the So the characteristics are going to be different. Uh, this one's going to be probably physically bigger because it's lower frequency, but it's basically doing um, exactly the same thing. They've decided to use a distributed element filter there, and then, uh, This Original design goes directly into the cover like this, whereas this one. it's got some extra stuff in there, so maybe it's got like an extra Um driver or something like that.

I Don't know what's going on there, but anyway, it's the same topology. The general topology is the same. It goes into a coupler like this. but here's where there's a huge difference.

Here's the Vco the voltage controlled oscillator. the PLL This is the first local oscillator. It's basically uh, the same. I Haven't looked into detailed in the Uh parts there like you know they got some Regulators down in here to um, uh, you know, local regulation.

There's local regulation all over these boards so you'll find like little chips here probably here here as well. Um, these are all like uh, local regulation CU It's not just the one 3.3 volt rail or whatever it is powering this whole thing to because these uh sections are so critical you need to isolate power. particularly say for a preamp for example that needs its own local regulation. Um, you know, and this mixer might need its own regulation, these are critical.

RF Parts It's why they go to all the effort to separate all the sections like this and then Shield them with the big aluminium block and all that sort of stuff. So not only do you have to Shield them separate, uh, eliminate cross talk between them, you also want to eliminate, uh, cross talk by way of the power supply. So you have local regulators and stuff like that. Anyway, we've got our Vco PLL our first local oscillator.

Basically the same thing happening here. Okay, but look, what's going on here. This has got a frequency doubler in here I don't think we've got that and we've got some single pole double throw switches in here which we don't have over here. in this case.

Look, it's going directly into the coupler. whereas if that was happening over here, it would have bypassed all of this stuff here. All this stuff is additional on the 3000 model because it's higher frequency and it has to get the different Uh frequency ranges. So this is the inter digital band pass filter here.

There's three separate sections and there's switches up here to um divide the signal into those, and then, uh, combine them over here, some more switches, and then it finally goes into the coupler. whereas the VNA over here just goes directly from the Uh local oscillator straight in to the coupler and doesn't have all of this stuff. So that's a significant uh cost saving. Um, obviously like there's no cost involved in, say, these interdigital, um, these distributed element filters.

The band pass filter here. There's nothing in that, um, no component cost. It's just uh, board space. But all these extra chips you got to buy.

you know, this frequency doubler. These Uh switches. These proper RS switches aren't cheap and stuff like that, so it avoids all that because it doesn't doesn't have the frequency range and possibly the performance of the original 3000 model. So that's probably the major difference in this entire design.

Uh, now let's go back to the mixer here. So we've got our got our mixer over here like this and we've got our mixer here. Okay, so and then that goes into an amp. here.

it looks like it's a different amp amplifier chip. Look, they've got a little Um Qfn package down in there. It's a one I probably show the data sheet in the uh previous video, but this one over here has just got a little six pin so 23 package. Anyway, that's probably like an amplifier and then um, it's actually got these.

Looks like it's got them. Uh, back to front here. it's got a bow tie low pass filter as a distributed element filter. The low pass filter is once again, just done with that discrete capacitors and inductors in there.

Um, for performance reasons I Don't know they may be. Uh, chose that of course because the Distributing element filter is actually lower cost. You got to pay for these capacitors inductors, but you know they trivial cost in the scheme of things. Um, so maybe it was just a performance thing that they, uh, uh, went away.

Um, they went away from the distributed element filter. Anyway, they've got the band pass filter here and the bow tie filter back to front. Not that it makes really any difference. I Guess Anyway, they've decided to swap those two around.

Um, but once again, we've still got a distributed element filter band pass filter and you can see it's physically bigger on this lower frequency model than it is on the higher frequency um, uh, 3000 model over here. so you know you see some physical differences, but it's still doing the same thing. You can see the topology between them is exactly the same. It's a band pass filter implemented as a Distributing element filter Anyway, that goes into a mix over here and it goes into a mixer over here.

Exactly the same thing. some physical location, uh, differences here. Anyway, that mixer uh is being fed from the second local oscillator here. which then goes into a low pass filter, a band pass filter, and goes into the mixer.

Over here. it's the second local oscillator, a low pass filter in this case I Don't think there's any band pass filter there. Um, so they've just got a low pass filter once again, instead of a distributed element filter. Um, they've got that as a discrete component filter here.

But anyway, second local oscillator into the mixer. Exactly the same thing and then out of the mixer goes into a Uh saw filter. That's these two parts down in here. There we go.

They're the saw filters and I believe I included the data sheet on the previous one. Uh, I won't go through again, but where are we? Yep, s filter. They look very similar to me. So there you go.

s filter and then into the mixer. What is that? A got to have a mirror to read it anyway? Um, it looks very similar to the mixer over here, but no. I think no it it's a different one. You'd expect a different Uh performance mixer in there anyway and it looks like there's a couple of differen is in here.

The output of the mixer um goes to a switch. Another switch over here. they have the same switch part over here. Um, but basically then that goes straight to the output here.

Okay, that's the intermediate frequency output on the previous design. uh which then went via the coax but the new VNA is a bit different they didn't have in the 3000. they had that as a separate physical block and separate aluminium block that had the cable going over and they had the ADC um in there and the filter. but uh, this.

So all this stuff is now implemented in the main block here. So the 12-bit um analog to digital converter which I believe is the same one I'll have to verify same one they had in the 3000 but it was mounted on the separate board but it's now built into here. They just went. Ah, buger it.

We don't want to have a separate physical block, we can just put it on this made board. thank you very much. And then another difference is that the VNA seems to have its reference oscillator under here. Once again, these look like some Regulators dead giveaway in that is just a cap on the output there.

So they're uh, powering all this stuff and locally of course. Um, and that's our 10 MHz reference oscillator whereas that was external on the main board. um on the 3000 model. so that's you.

You know, substantial difference there. So as you can see like from a functional uh block diagram point of view, it's you know it's very similar but a difference performance level to the original 3000 model. and that's exactly what you expect because it's the same topology. Spectrum Analyzer You Know It's All Digital If so, it's you know, got to get the intermediate frequency output and then it digitizes all that.

Which is you know, different to, uh, previous? you know, really older generation? uh uh Spectrum analyzer like analog Spectrum analyzer designs for example. Um, and they're doing exactly the same thing, but at this point we don't readily see any huge differences. For the VNA the only thing we see is like we've got this circuitry up here like this, which doesn't look like much doing. There's an unpopulated little RF connector there, but you'll notice that the new VNA model has you know, significantly different components on there.

H May you know, like quite similar? Anyway, I'll have to show the bottom of that, but we have an additional RF connector here that we didn't have previously. Okay, so what we need to look at now is the track engine and we've got the SSA 3000 on top and the new VNA 105x on the bottom here and you can see that they're very similar. Once again, everything's mounted on the other side of the board. so I've had to flip it so you can see here that the connectors are physically on the other well here on the other side of the board like this compared to the two models.

so that's why on the Uh SVA one, you might find that the well you will find that the text is mirror image cuz I had to flip it Anyway, you can see that the topology is very similar. Okay, here's our tracking generator output here and you can see that comes from pretty much identical circuitry around here. We can go like the individual chips might be a bit different, but of course we've got a different frequency range. uh, tracking Gen so you know you'd kind of expect that.

And here is the input coming from that uh coupler that we saw on the main board. And once again, you know, like this stuff around here looks to be similar to what's here I don't know what's doing here. These look like Mcrel uh, voltage? Regulators I think Anyway, um anyway, so it comes in here does the same thing. We've got a bow bow tie low pass filter like this goes up that chip there looks identical.

We've got this going across here here and once again, we've replaced our distributed element filter with a discrete component filter. But apart from that, um yeah, that is our tracking gen. It's all exactly the same. and all this stuff over here.

What have we got? We've got a well, can't see that because it's Mirror Image go up there H 835 and H83 5 if you want to look at that mirror image. So exactly the same stuff going on here on the new one pretty much. but the only difference is down here. look at this.

Aha. We have that extra RF connector going over that we saw on the main board that we didn't have before and you'll notice that um, whereas this is is its own isolated block up here, it now breaks that isolated block and the signal comes down here. This is actually a digital switch down here. we can pull up the data sheet for that one.

So these two parts down here are uh HMC 284 non-reflective uh switches DC to 3.5 gig for those playing along at home. So you know, overkill for what we need here. So what it looks like they're doing is taking the tracking output and actually feeding that back through these switches into there like that which then goes via coax over back to the main board which then I think what's happening is they're using there's no dedicated circuitry to measure the reflective power because that's basically what you have to do in a vector Network analyzer to get your S11 parameters um for your uh V for your VNA is to measure meure the reflected power coming back from your tracking generator output cuz that's exactly what we have to do. So what they're doing is actually using the existing Spectrum analyzer measurement Hardware uh to actually then measure the reflected power.

So there must be sort of like multiplexing between doing the Spectrum analyzer sweep and then doing a reflected power sweep. It seems like that's how they're doing it anyway. and if so, that's a very very way. And that's a very clever way to do it with very little additional.

Hardware I Mean look, you know just this additional Hardware here, which is basically bugger all plus a little bit extra on the main board to feed it back into the Spectrum analyzer input. and Bob's your uncle. So if we go back over here and have a look at where this one goes back over to our main board, you can see it actually comes in here like this, so it's associated with this circuitry. here.

it looks like there's just regulators and other stuff on the back. So I'm not exactly sure what's doing here, but there may be a path for this to come through. Is this an additional? Is this a switch that then switches this path back into here so that it can measure that reflected power over the bandwidth and use the existing? Use the all the existing Spectrum analyzer Hardware that they've got in here to measure that. um, you know to measure the phase and the amplitude of that.

So I think that's I Think that's possibly what they're doing cuz there's basically you know, like there's no actual measurement Hardware going on in here. So I think they're just switching it through that reflected power. Neat huh? In fact. Well, that's you know, without deeper analysis.

that seems to be what's going on here. and it makes sense because they're um, doing traditionally what is a very expensive functionality in a VN. There's a reason that they're very expensive and doing sort of like low-end uh VNA functionality and blending it with a traditional Spectrum analyzer. That's basically all there is to it by the looks of it.

So how much cost are they add in just for that? Plus this over here, you know, just just a couple of switches and an extra coax. Going back to do the VNA and do some software smarts and Multiplex between them that looks like what they're doing. Brilliant, well done, Siglin. All right, let's just take a quick look at uh, some operational capabilities of this thing.

Um, this is as I said, not a review because it would take me a Month of Sundays to look at every aspect and every feature of this product. It's just absolutely ridiculous, as is just any normal Spectrum analyzer, let alone one with VNA and other Uh capabilities. Just nuts. Anyway, let's just have a look at uh, some, uh, typical noise floor here.

Um, I've got an unterminated uh input resolution bandwidth of 10 khz just a smidge above- 115 uh Dbm there and rising up as is fairly typical. I Think that's a little smidgen better than the 3000 Series Um, but I don't have the 3000 Series uh scope here to actually compare it with. You'll have to watch my previous video. But anyway, this is a much better result than say the Ry one.

There's just no competition really. and this is with the Uh preamp turned on. Now, if we change our resolution bandwidth up here, we can. uh, there there it is at a megahertz for example.

So as typical, uh, the update rate is much faster at that. Um, and we can turn the Uh Preamp off and on. here. Here we go.

That's on and off. It's not nearly as good with that. uh, preamp off? Is it me? That's how it works I Expect the Spectrum analyzer functionality to be basically equivalent performance almost the same as the 3000 Series So I've already gone through that I won't bother. Uh, what we're interested in is, uh, some of the more, um, some of the different modes here.

So let's go into uh, distance to fault here and let's give it a bur, shall we? and T There It Is I've just got a coax flapping around in the breeze here, just unterminated at the end. And and sure enough, um, there it is. about 0.81 M And then we can, you know, plug in a uh A Terminator On the end of that, it'll drop. Hang on.

Expect it to drop. But yep, there we go. But yeah, we're still, you know, 86 M there. Near enough.

We haven't calibrated this thing uh, yet. So to calibrate it, we would actually need the calibration kit. And you'll see this in, um, not only just in this mode, but other modes as well. So you basically need that calibration kit in order if you're doing, you know, proper quantitative measurements in all this sort of stuff.

It basically you do open short, uh, compens open short load compensation on the thing. um so yeah, we don't have that calit which is like they should just include it like this is a it's on the front here, spectrum and network Vector Analyzer: it's a VNA yet the VNA is optional extra and even when you buy the VNA you don't even get the bloody calibration kit with it. Like how much is that worth? Like buger all yet I Think the street price is like for the cow kit I don't know couple hundred bucks or something, but God they should throw it in. This thing would be a killer if it had the VNA uh capability buildin for the base price of like under 1,400 bucks in the cow kit.

Unbelievable. Do Pbac and if you're curious to see the basic Uh track Eng Gen performance that's 1 dbm uh per division there it it's fairly typical I'm not sure if that's any better or worse than the Uh 3000. Okay, so let's go into our Vector Network analyzer VNA that's what we're here for and I've got it un the output unterminated. Uh, it can only do S11 and S21 cuz it's a two Port analyzer and they're the basic measurements.

Uh, you've got reflected power and your transmitted power basically. So if we look at S11 or the reflect Ed power in here, uh, where are we? We're 1 DB per division there. Let's whack on our empty coax shall we? And we should see. Yeah, bit higgledy piggley over the line.

Lay, let's plug in out. This is over the full span 1.5 gig. Let's plug in a uh Terminator on the end of that and just have a look, where are we? We want our scale per division. let's go to 20 DB per division.

There we go. Sweet. And that's our basic log magnitude. But of course we can do Smith charts or anything else.

Let's have a look at Um basically log phase Smith chart. Oh, is't it beautiful? It's pretty. It's full of stars. That's actually very cool.

Check that out because you they were due to those lobes that will get in over the entire band there. and uh, basically I won't go into Smith charts. There's actually no markers on this thing at all. There's no identifiers, it's just a blank screen so that's you know, not terrific.

Would have be nice to have some identifiers on there. Um, but these basically represent uh, pure resistances these circles. So this one might be 50 Ohms for example. And then if you and then these lines going out here represent your complex impedances going in your different phase angle like that.

So you know because we're fairly close to an ideal resistive load there, it's kind of in the middle like that, but we should see something funky if we actually disconnect this ready. Woohoo Go! Brilliant. It's going to get funkier though if we put it back. Oh I Can play with this all day.

The interesting aspect of this look. if if I just loosen this BNC we're actually changing the charact I just touched it there. We're actually changing the characteristic of the termination if I just like twist it and loosen it like that just a little bit. Check that out.

Significantly different just by mucking around with the load like that. Look at that. I just loosened it off bit. Wow, see the difference? That's terrific.

but of course that's um, over the full span of uh yeah? Oh there it is. 10 Meg to 1.5 gig. So let's actually change that. Let's going to, um, sorry, our span here.

Let's go into let's say let's do I don't know. 100 mahz span for example. It should show significantly less artifacts like that. There you go, cuz we're not over the full range anymore.

and if we drop that down to 10 MHz it'll probably go to a point. Will it Will it? Yeah. Pretty close. And of course we can do all the different formats here, but let's not worry about that.

As cool as it is. Um, let's actually go back. How do we go back? There we go. and we can, uh, change the scale of course of our actual chart here.

our Smith chart. Oh there we go. we're going to go under. we're going backwards.

There we go small, oh down to um half. There you go and up. we should start seeing above that we should start seeing multiples. Yeah, there we go.

Oh so pretty. Anyway, all the RF effici and a getting very excited now. I Was going to show you this demo with my telescopic Rod antenna but unfortunately, um I can't find it. It's in the lab here here somewhere so we'll make do with this state-of-the-art antenna here.

which is our yellow wire. Um, and don't fiddle with it because that'll change your characteristics of your antenna. So we're basically measuring the reflected uh power from the antenna here. So I was going to use my telescopic Rod to show you that when I move it in and out, it changes.

but we can do the same thing. but I won't touch anything else. We'll just do a snip of our an antenna. There we go.

that's going to significantly change. Oh, get out of there significantly change our antenna and snipp it again. Oh snippety dudea it's brilliant. Look I love it and we're going to shorten our tener again and tener again which of course changes the characteristics and changes what? Reflections We get back from the antenna and we can visualize that in terms of complex impedances on our Smith chart.

So there you go. It's fun. anyway. What a You can play with this all day.

It's great. Okay let's try the uh demodulation, uh cap modulation analysis of this thing. I've just got a 1 gig uh carrier here with an amplitude modulated 1 khz sine wave on here. So let's go into mode and modulation analysis.

Let's have a play around. um hello, where's my Am option Am and FM I do believe like I think these are like you buy them as different options but why I wouldn't have Am and FM what the what's going on system like where's all my stuff? There's all our system messages by the way. that's when I did the pebcak overloading my ADC oops sorry, no, looks like it's not installed AMA A bugger. Anyway, bugger that? Um, I'm not going to muck around the modulation analysis.

Suffice it to say that if you fed in your what do we got um, your amplitude shift keying in here, then you'd be able to see your way. for if you had your Am modulation, it should be able to decode, um, demodulate and show you that 1 khz sinewave? that's the idea. Anyway, Anyway I think that'll do it for uh this video which is tear down and a quick little look at this thing. um as I said, a review video would take a weekend of Sundays to do so I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that at this stage, but uh, others are talking about this on the EV blog.

Forum They have units in hand and they can, you know, do tests and uh, things like that. I'm sure there'll be no end of discussion about this, but it is a very interesting bit of kit. it's it's basically the first lowcost. VNA in this sort of form factor, you can get other ones that uh, you know, plug into your USB port and they come with PC software and all that sort of jazz and and I think like apart like the good brand ones are very sign like double the cost of this one for example or significantly more I Know there are potentially some, uh, cheaper options than this because this is basically going to be two grand by the time you include the VNA.

Now, whether or not they're uh, going to, uh, like, do any bundling options. maybe not at the start, but as we've seen with not only Sigin, but the other manufacturers, once these have been on the market for a while, competition comes in or the sales aren't what they were expecting, they start bundling in the options and uh, if they bundled in the VNA for $395 or whatever. Wow. I think that would be an absolute killer.

Um, like it's not, um, going to set the world on fire in terms of vector network analysis. I mean like you can't, uh, do like your different, uh, like, you can't separate? Sorry. I'm aware. Anyway, you can't like separate the screen and display the different uh functions and things like that.

so that would have been nice. So it's kind of. you could call it like rudimentary. Uh, Vector Network analyzer.

But it what? What was that? What was that? Is that a bug? Is that a bug? It's going to happen again. Sweeping across might have an acquisition bug there I didn't touch anything belly and breeded on it I'm just yelling at it. Um, so that's interesting, but uh yeah. I'd Expect the firmware to be relatively mature because it's probably based on, um, the existing 3000 Series which has been out for several years now.

So I haven't been keeping up with sort of like the firmware, bug fixes and things like that. but uh, anyway, it should be reasonably, uh, mature at this stage. And if you're in the market for a vector Network analyzer. Jeez, check it out.

But uh yeah, it' be interesting to compare something like this with like, maybe a low cost or a similar cost. USB based Vector Network Analyzer I Know there's a couple of do-it-yourself projects. There's been maybe a Kickstarter or two out there for a uh VNA hasn't there. Um, but anyway, it's a very interesting bit of kit for those into RF stuff not only for you know, antenna tuning, but uh, you know, diplexers and filters and all sorts of you know, Rfy type things that you want to uh, measure and calibrate the performance of.

And in this case, this can do your basic S11 and S21 parameters. So um, in a bit of Kit You Could argue that it's probably a bit pricey for the Uh 600 over 600 bucks for the VNA option. but I don't know. Um, you'd have to compare it with the competition on the market which I don't have at the moment.

Anyway, Sigin could have a winner on their hands. Here it pretty much comes down to uh, price and Market uh, penetration and stuff like that I wouldn't like to speculate what the market is for A For the lowcost Vnas and stuff like that, you pretty much got to be into the RF uh side of things to get value out of this. If you're just a your regular basic hobbyist or basic engineer working on stuff, then a VNA is not something that's ordinarily part of your kit. but to I guess to have the option later to actually just buy if you need it, then just buy the software license.

Bam. Away you go. Um, with your existing bit of Kit If you're in the market for a new Spectrum analyzer, then it might be worth a look, but it is limited to the 1.5 gig it is. There is no option to go higher.

There's no. As far as I'm aware, the hardware internal is only designed for 1.5 gig. They have no intention of uh, going higher if you want higher frequency. That's what the 3000 version is for.

but it doesn't have that that. Vector Network analyzer stuff. Whether or not they're going to come out with a a like a 3000, a SVA 3000 version I wouldn't surprise me at all in the future, but I don't know anything about that. Anyway, this one is a fun bit of Kit so it's definitely worth checking out.

As always, discuss down below: EV BL Blog forums The best place to discuss uh, test gear and stuff like that without a doubt. And as always, high res art. Tear down photos down below so you can have play around with it. and no I don't know anything about hacks.

Um for this thing. So yeah, I don't know people might be able to do it in the future? Who knows Anyway, hope you enjoy this little look at the SVA 1015 if you liked it. Please give it a big thumbs up. The video that is, you may or may not like this I Don't know.

Anyway, catch you next time.