I bought a PCB carrying a TQP3M9009 LNA with a view to using this as the initial gain stage of my receiver. This cost me about £8 from eBay.

I figured the first thing to do with this was to make some basic measurements using my LiteVNA. To avoid having the output power of the amplifier damage the VNA I performed calibration and all measurements with a 20 dB attenuator on port 2. For posterity, I note that I powered the PCB directly from a 5V USB charger.

Here's a plot showing S21 and S11:

This seems about right to me — the measured gain is pretty similar to the gain reported in the part's datasheet. Here's a similar plot focused on the broadcast FM band:

This shows an obvious step in gain of around 1.7 dB at 100 MHz. I don't see a similar step in the S-parameters in the datasheet, so I don't think this is expected. (I wonder what causes it? Update: I think I've figured it out. See this log for details.)

That aside, it looks like this gives me 23-25 dB of gain across the whole band, with an input that's kinda matched to 50 ohms. So this might be good enough for some initial testing, though I do wonder if the step in gain in the middle of the broadcast FM band might cause problems later.