tinyPFA home page
What is the tinyPFA?
The tinyPFA is a Phase Frequency Analyzer, it is a portable, battery operated, two input device with a 4 inch display that can measure very precise frequency and phase differences between the signals applied to both inputs. The input frequency can be any frequency between 1 MHz and 300 MHz. Typical use is to measure the differences between two 10 MHz clocks. The tinyPFA can numerically display the phase and frequency difference, show the measurement in a graph versus time, store the measurements on a SD card inserted into an SD card slot, or send the phase measurements over USB to a PC, running a program such as TimeLab, for further display and processing. Phase and Frequency measurement accuracy is better then 1e-12 divided by the measurement time in seconds with decimation set to 1 Be aware the maximum frequency difference that can be display depends on the measurement time (Tau) and is approximately 200 Hz / (Tau in s) so for Tau is 1 s it is 200 Hz maximum difference
Video
Here is a video demonstrating an earlier version of the software: https://youtu.be/1LOxep-1ai0
How to get a tinyPFA?
The tinyPFA consists of the hardware of a nanoVNA-H4 and a special SW that can be downloaded for free from here
You can buy a fully configured tinPFA from these locations.
Or you can buy a nanoVNA-H4 from these locations and load the SW yourself.
After getting both the HW and SW you need to load the SW onto the HW It is always possible to restore the nanoVNA-H4 back to its original state by loading one of the nanoVNA-H4 SW's
ATTENTION: The nanoVNA-H4 is only platform that can be converted into a Phase Frequency Analyzer. None of the other small VNA's can be used.
ATTENTION: The tinyPFA does not contain an internal high stability reference. It will only perform a high accuracy phase difference measurement between two input clocks.
Videos featuring the tinyPFA
Using the tinyPFA