Here’s a design of the instrument that is very useful for radio frequency (rf) engineer and hobbyist, especially when he/she has to adjust the final rf transmission. Setting up an antenna impedance matcher is one of the examples. This is the figure of the circuit;
The circuit uses only one transistor (MPSA18) as the active component. The signal strength meter display uses analog meter (1 mA full scale). This rf field strength meter has no absolute scale if we don’t calibrate the scale using a standard instrument, but the important thing for this un-calibrated rf meter is that it can display the changes of an rf field when we calibrate the antenna or the matching network for the rf transmitter-antenna loading. If we are tuning the antenna size or the transmitter-antenna matcher filter, then just observe the analog meter to get the maximum deflection.