HW and SW review

[jkassot]

I received the XaVNA in Netherlands and tested it with a WG antenna at 2700-3000 MHz.

1. The board seems to be of high built quality, however it appears to be a problem with the port SMA connectors and the aluminum housing. As the connectors are not secured on the enclosure, any movement of the measurement cables is transferred to the edge SMA connectors and to the board itself making the measurements jump around by 2-3 db or more. Not good for consistency. Is this issue has also been identified above as "Port Length Extension Support"? Or refers to electrical extension of the ports? It should have an easy fix at the following production batch.

2. I used the device with a Windows 10 DELL notebook. The SW is intuitive, easy to use and fast responding. However, I could not find a way to adjust the vertical scale in order to zoom into the measurements as the full dynamic range is always being displayed. That restricted the displayed accuracy to a few db. In this way could not take advantage of the measurement precision. It would be absolutely necessary to provide the option to adjust the min and the max value of the vertical scale (mainly in db and secondary in deg).

3. The measurement export function is available only for Touchstone format and thus a specialized viewer is required to view and manipulate the measurements . It would be very helpful if there could be an output of the measurements in db and deg units as a generic Delimited Text File (DTF) that could be easily imported into Excel, MATLAB or any other application. Screen exports as .jpg or .pdf would also be helpful although there is always the workaround of screen capture.

4. The device applications would be vastly expanded if the Transmit and Receive functions could be used independently as a CW RF generator (adjust frequency and power) and as a calibrated Spectrum Analyzer and Peak Power meter (using the cursor). I think that almost all the code is there, just need some user interface.

Thanks for a really good product with a potential to become much better and versatile.

[xaxaxa]

(1) i've noticed this issue after the first batch, and the current plan is to switch to a bulkhead sma connector that is screwed to the enclosure for later units (the full two port version already has this implemented); for the current units a workaround is to stuff some double sided tape between the board and enclosure cover plate so that it fits tightly. 3dB sounds high though; in my tests I've only seen up to 0.5dB of changes; i'd try with another cable and see if it improves. Thanks for bringing this up.
(2) the software is still under development and i'm working to implement those features asap
(3) i've added a todo for this one
(4) that is possible but might require updates to the firmware, since currently the device only sends values after the integrate-and-dump unit; i'm going to add a register that allows you to switch to raw adc data output, and add some facilities in libxavna to support this.

Thanks