Smith Chart Basics + VNA Paperclip Test
Keysight Labs
The basics of how to use a Smith Chart and the RF performance of a paperclip Register to win test gear ► https://bit.ly/KULive2 ◄ Subscribe: http://bit.ly/KLabs_sub
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00:00 Getting Started 00:27 How to Plot Complex Impedances on a Smith Chart 01:30 Open and short circuits on the Smith Chart 01:40 Normalized impedances and impedance matching on the Smith Chart 02:25 Smith Charts over changing frequencies 02:47 Testing a paperclip's RF performance with a Smith Chart and VNA 04:30 Testing Mega Clippy's RF antenna performance with a Smith Chart and VNA
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The USB Streamline Series VNA I used (P5004A): https://www.keysight.com/us/en/products/network-analyzers/streamline-series-usb-vector-network-analyzers/p50xxa-streamline-series-usb-vector-network-analyzers.html
Today we’re going explore Smith Chart basics, and then use that information to learn about the RF performance of a paperclip. Would this make a good antenna, at what frequencies does it resonate? A Smith chart makes this really easy to see.
Smith Charts look scary at first, but they’re not once you know what’s going on. Let’s start with a complex impedance, say .5 + j1.1.
If you plot out this impedance on the complex plane, our X-Axis is our real component, or resistance, and the Y-Axis is our imaginary component, or inductance and capacitance. Inductors are positive, capacitors are negative. And you can plot it! We see where our real component .5 and our imaginary component, 1.1, meet, and we plot it. Simple Algebra 1 stuff.
A smith chart is basically this graph, but you curl it in on itself into a circle.
This might seem weird, because all of these axis go to infinity. It would be hard to plot infinity resistance on this, but with the Smith Chart we can. And, an open circuit is infinite resistance, infinity is not some weird edge case for electronics – open circuits are everywhere!
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