LabView is old and very expensive. As the user base dies off and people search for lower cost and license friendly solutions, I assume they came out with the community version in an attempt to try and recapture future sales. IMO, NI would have been better off summing that lawyer speak into 5 sentences or less in layman's terms. I'm not sure I can ethically distribute my software using the community version without hiring a lawyer to interpret their license agreement. I'm sure some sales or marketing director at NI has it all figured out.
Cost I would imagine by the time I cover the income taxes, sales takes and cost of the license, we are upwards of three.
Regarding your firmware support: Which platforms/authors will you continue to support operability with your software?
Interesting that you would ask as LabView now appears to support the Mac and LINUX under a single license. This was never the case before. If you wanted to target a different OS, you bought a separate license. Still I have no use for LINUX or the Mac and doubt I would invest anything to support them. I did try using LabView on LINUX when NI first released it. It was a total time waste. Pretty much my experience with LINUX throughout the years which is why I will not support it.
I have no plans to develop software for any devices using the original protocol. I have no idea which of these low cost VNAs are compatible. If your VNA is backward compatible with the V2+, V2+4 or Lite, then it should work. Any testing I do will be with the V2Plus4 and the LiteVNA64.
Primary reason for posting: I thought I understood from the first comparison graph that v2+4 was doing much better than the original at that ~3Mhz frequency. The further comparisons showed the original doing very well in comparison to the other machines.
Why did the original do poorly in comparison to v2+4 and then do well against others?
Sorry but I am not sure I follow. When you ask why something did poorly by comparison, it tells me very little without disclosing what metrics you are using. My V2Plus4 has never been able to make narrow band measurements. I've stated that several times and talked about it during my review of the V2+4. I've said if you work below 300MHz and plan to make narrow band measurements, stay with the original NanoVNA. If you want to experiment with PDN measurements, the original NanoVNA still out performs the others. According to Dislord, the H4 does a better job at the lower frequencies. That may be true today but the last time we had that discussion, I posted a fair bit of data showing otherwise. I suspect the problems were caused by firmware. The whole VNA has to work, firmware needs to be stable .... for me to spend any time with it.
Since buying the Lite, I have not done much with the other products. I am interested in seeing what Dislord comes up with for benchmark data at lower frequencies with the DC block and transient protection removed. IMO, that's it's only weak spot. Still, for the cost, who can complain? All of these products have been well worth their price.