In a way Ham Radio has always been related fairly closely to science. Ham's are experimenting with radio waves so exept for the approach and the more formal organisation of the science world, Ham's are a kind of scientists by themselves.

But there's more as these two worlds don't live completely separated from each other. Many scientists are als Ham's but also some hams are doing research that is actually pretty close to the same work scientists are doing.

Recently I've learned about something calles "HAMSCI" short for "Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation".

I've learned about this vector analyser recently and its price and specs makes it really attractive for Ham Radio !

It is a vector network analyser from 50kHz-300MHz but via software upgrades can be expanded up to 900MHz.
So great for the HF bands, 2m and 70cm ham bands.

It's a 2 port analyser so you can use it for both antenna's and filters

And now the price... less than 50 Euro's !!

You can find all technical information about in here: http://nanovna.com/

If you work a lot with arduino's you might run into this very annoying problem that com port numbers keep changing with each upload...

The solution is to make your operating system forget the previous serial devices that have been plugged into the USB port.

To do this under Linux type the following commands:

sudo modprobe -r cdc-acm
sudo modprobe -r ftdi-sio