Hi Trystan
This is Barry.
I've given what I would call a Beginner's Guide to the Nano VNA talk now ten times.
Each time is different, in that I see where folks "lose" a concept.
So the next time I try to insert a slide or two that gives some reference.
Folks do not in general understand what causes REACTANCE in a dipole antenna, nor do they understand that a wire antenna has multiple resonances. I decided to go to a more common analogy: pushing a child on a swing. Even young kids "know" when grampy needs to push them -
"Grampy - push when I am at the end of the arc, when my velocity is zero. Then your push will be in-phase with my natural resonance, and my amplitude will increase. YEAH."
Of course, the grandkid swinging is like the current on an end-fed dipole, and grampy is the feed line, giving the push to the electrons. We can ALL understand that mechanical analogy of "resonance". If the timing (phase) is wrong, then the antenna has a REACTANCE. Pushing the grandchild on the swing too soon or pushing too late causes a problem - we can call these capacitive or inductive reactance - but these are just names. What is the root cause of the problem anyway?
How do we prevent the feed line from pushing at the wrong time??? Can we correct this phase issue by a better "match" at the antenna? How can this little Nano VNA gadget help?
The Nano VNA as a piece of hardware is very complicated..... just like an EKG if you try to make sense of it (and I do each time I visit my crdiologist, much to his delight).
If you already have a pretty good basic understanding of why an antenna has resistance, reactance, impedance, resonant frequencies (yes, plural) and know what PHASE means, then this is just one cool gadget. For under $100 you can take all kinds of measurements over a variety of HF, VHF, and now UHF frequencies and examine multiple graphs at once on software such as VNA SAVER (fantastic).
I do not think any of my talks are posted on youtube, and actually, I would not want that.
I'm not a trained RF Engineer, and with each talk, there are some errors I make (often the engineers point these out at the end of my talk, or to me personally). That's great. I learn as I go.
I think I can give a pretty good 8th grade version of How a VNA Works now.
Just like my cardiologist says I have an 8th grade understanding of my EKG.
He says I need to concentrate on PHASE, not AMPLITUDE of my EKG.
I can say the same about interpretting your antenna's Smith Chart, or R,X,Z graphs.
It's fun learning with each presentation.
If you really want to understand something, try teaching it to someone else.
I've been doing that as a Physics teacher/professor for almost five decades, and by far, my greatest challenge in my teaching career was teaching 9th graders basic fundamental physics with no more math than some simple algebra one.
De Barry Feierman k3eui
Phila region
Barry K3EUI