PicoVNA® 100 Series vector network analyzers

PicoVNA feature

PicoVNA 5 current release

PicoVNA 3

Operating system, platform and display

Supported operating systems

Linux, Windows 7+, macOS 11 (Big Sur)+

Linux test distributions Debian 8 (Jessie) , Ubuntu 18.04

(LTS), Mint Cinnamon (Vera), openSUSE Leap 15.0,

Fedora 28, Arch Linux. No problems anticipated on other

distributions.

Windows only

Supported controllers

PC, Mac (Intel/Arm), Linux AArchh64 onwards, Pi 3

onwards 64 bit

PC only

Supported display resolution

All

Limited rescaling to monitor aspect and resolution

Development environment

Generic, foundational and ground-up design. Built for

speed, scalability and cross-platform compatibility.

Maintains compatibility with older computer hardware

while making efficient use of modern hardware to unlock

new data processing possibilities. Designed to be

capable of rapid expansion to meet ever evolving user

requirements.

Legacy MSWindows design environment and toolset,

limited scope and design efficiency to rapidly meet ever

increasing user needs.

Measurement viewports (channels)

Live traces per viewport (plot channel)

2

4

Dual-axis plots

Yes

Memory traces per viewport (plot channel)

Unlimited*

4

Number of viewports (plot channels)

1 to unlimited*

1, 2 or 4

No. of live time domain viewports (plot channels)

Unlimited* (from any span setting)

1 (requires 2n measurement points)

User scaling and positioning of plots

Drag position and shape with snap to infinite grid

No, three built in layouts only

Plot variants

Plot types

Cartesian (Time and Frequency), Polar, Smith

Plot formats

Log Mag, Lin Mag, Phase, Re, Im, Group Delay, VSWR, TD

Plot interpolations

User prefered linear, Cubic Spline or Akima Spline applied

to Mag/Angle or Re/Im

Linear dot join on frequency domain plots, cubic spline on

TD plots

Time domain variants

Low pass (step/impulse) and band pass (impulse) with

Hanning, Rectangular and Kaiser Bessel windowing and

Auto/Manual DC termination

Low Pass with Hanning, rectangular and Kaiser Bessel

windowing and Auto/Manual DC termination

PicoVNA 5/PicoVNA 3 feature comparison

PicoVNA 5 software will be preferred by most users. There will however be a brief period for which certain PicoVNA features are not yet addressed in the new software. PicoVNA 3

software therefore remains available and fully supported. The table below gives full detail comparison of features between the two softwares.