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Comment by henrikf | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the submission. Author here if you have any questions.

Not a technical question, just want to say I really appreciate your projects! I work with a group of radar engineers and they were absolutely floored by your €800 C-band polarimetric SAR drone.

Any tips for working on hobby RF/microwave projects and staying motivated while doing them? I am an EE and have a long list of projects I want to do at home, but I can never seem to find the time to do them.

I have also had issues with motivation. I had a long pause from about 2019 to 2024 where I didn't work on personal electronics projects because I didn't have enough motivation. This and last year however I have been very productive and it's hard to say what exactly changed, just felt like working on them.

I'm surprised you're not using SMA edge connectors designed for 15G. The ones you're using, with the long center pin, aren't really 50 ohm above 6G. Higher freq SMAs have really tiny center pin for SMT soldering with low capacitance.

Makes sense

I work in retail but most 5G devices have these awful TS9 or similar connectors which we have to adapt to something usable like SMA

I literally have customers returning products as faulty because “the connector just will not sit correctly!” - even though it’s performing as intended

I just want to say thank you for your work. I bought one for the lab last year and I love it. Maybe even saved my job.

Do you have a link to the files on github? I assume https://github.com/Ttl/vna2 is the older version?

It's not on Github, but I do have schematic at the end of the blog post. vna2 is the previous version.

Can you please create a high speed oscilloscope next? :-)

Depending on what you mean by 'high speed', this project may be of interest: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/crowd-funded-projects/haasosco...!

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