It seems he's wanting to use the SA as a poor-man's scalar network analyzer, and now that he's spent the money, is also trying to investigate other ways to measure "stuff"--and trying to figure out what that "stuff" might be, and if it could be useful. To be honest, it warms my heart.
That's precisely it. I am just trying to figure out what all is available, what it does and how well, and if it could prove useful to me. I'm not buying a network analyzer, and from what I gather, it is no more suited to what I need than my cheap SA (I don't need phase information, s-parameters and so forth, I just want to pass my tracking generator into a DUT and measure the -3db cutoff of that device. Simple?
? If it matters greatly, the frequencies I want to measure are 1MHz to 1.5GHz