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That $40 Chinese handheld spectrum analyzer I bought on a whim actually found a ghost frequency in a King Air 200's NAV radio last Tuesday
Spent 3 hours chasing a glideslope deviation with a $12k IFR box showing nothing, pulled out the cheap knockoff just for laughs, and it pinpointed a harmonic from a cabin entertainment system that nobody in our shop had ever caught before, has anyone else had a budget tool save a job against the calibrated stuff?
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white.seth11d ago
Call that a fluke and nothing more. You got lucky once with a toy that happened to catch a harmonic a real spectrum analyzer would have found if you had actually known how to use it properly. Those cheap Chinese boxes drift like crazy, have terrible shielding, and give false positives all the time because they pick up noise from their own internal components. If you bring that thing into an environment with any real RF interference it'll show you ghosts everywhere and send you down the wrong rabbit hole for hours. I'd trust a $12k IFR box that's been calibrated last week over a $40 Amazon special any day of the week.
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alex_taylor1011d agoMost Upvoted
Man you really went all in on that Amazon special, huh @white.seth? Must be nice having a $12k IFR box sitting around, most of us are out here trying to find a 2.4ghz interference with a box that cost less than a tank of gas. I get it, cheap gear can be janky, but sometimes a lucky guess works just as good as a calibrated lab session.
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