Part of our New Ham? This Is Where You Should Spend Your Money guide.
I have been using the RigExpert Stick Pro for a while now, and I will just say it up front: I love this thing. If you are still tuning antennas by ear with an SWR meter and a lot of patience, an analyzer like this changes everything, and the Stick Pro in particular has become one of the pieces of gear I reach for the most.
What makes it great
The size is the first thing that sells it. At about 7.3 inches long and 6.5 ounces, it genuinely fits in a jacket pocket, which means it comes with me on portable trips instead of staying home because it was too much trouble to pack. The color TFT display is sharp and easy to read even outside in daylight, and it shows a full SWR sweep across a band, not just a single frequency reading, so you can actually see the shape of your antenna’s response and where the true minimum sits.
Coverage from 100 kHz to 600 MHz means it handles everything from 160 meters through UHF, so it is not just an HF tool, it covers my VHF and UHF antennas too. It is a true vector analyzer, which means it is not just giving you SWR, it reads out R, X, Z, magnitude, and phase, along with inductance and capacitance, which is genuinely useful when you are troubleshooting a balun, checking a trap, or measuring an unknown coil instead of guessing. The multi mode display, which shows SWR across several bands at once, is a fast way to sanity check a multiband antenna without stepping through each band one at a time.
Bluetooth pairs it with the AntScope app on my phone, so I can watch the sweep from the base of the antenna while someone else stays at the tower, or just walk the sweep myself without running back and forth to a laptop. The built in rechargeable battery and USB-C charging round it out. It just works, and it keeps working, which is really all you can ask from a field tool.
How it compares to the rest of the RigExpert lineup
RigExpert makes a genuinely large range of analyzers, and it helps to think of them in three families.
| Model | Frequency range | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Stick 230 | 0.1 to 230 MHz | Budget friendly HF and 2m field checks, monochrome e-paper display |
| Stick 500 | 0.1 to 500 MHz | Adds VHF/UHF range over the Stick 230 in the same compact body |
| Stick Pro | 0.1 to 600 MHz | Full vector analysis, color display, Bluetooth, TDR and cable tools in a pocket size unit |
| Stick XPro | 0.1 to 1000 MHz | The widest range Stick, for anyone working satellite or higher UHF antennas |
| AA-35 / AA-55 ZOOM | 0.06 to 35 / 55 MHz | HF focused, lab grade accuracy, favored by contesters and DXers doing serious antenna work |
| AA-230 ZOOM | 0.1 to 230 MHz | Bench style unit adding 2m to the ZOOM line, larger screen for tower and shop use |
| AA-650 / 1500 / 2000 ZOOM | 0.1 up to 2000+ MHz | Higher end bench analyzers for VHF, UHF, and satellite uplink antenna work |
The short version: the orange ZOOM line (AA-35/55/230) is built for people who want the most precise possible HF and VHF measurements from a bench style unit, often at a fixed station or workshop. The green ZOOM line (AA-650 and up) pushes that same bench style precision up into UHF and satellite territory. The Stick family trades a little bit of that bench precision for portability, ruggedness, and the ability to slip the whole analyzer into a bag without a second thought.
For me, that tradeoff is exactly right. I am usually out at a portable site or up a ladder, not sitting at a bench, and the Stick Pro’s mix of range, real vector measurements, and genuinely portable size makes it the analyzer I actually have with me when I need it. If your antenna work happens mostly at a fixed station and you want the absolute best HF accuracy on the bench, the AA-55 ZOOM or AA-230 ZOOM are worth a look. But for anyone who wants one analyzer that goes everywhere and does almost everything, the Stick Pro earns its spot in my bag every time. It pairs naturally with whichever tuner you end up choosing, since a good analyzer tells you exactly what the tuner is correcting for.