The inventions and products featured on these pages were chosen either for their uniqueness in the RF engineering realm, or are simply awesome
(or ridiculous) enough to warrant an appearance.
All Featured Product Archive Pages:
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 Dr. Michael Steer, Lampe Distinguished Professor of Electrical and computer Engineering at the NC State University, has released half a dozen of his books on RF system and circuit design in the form of OpenAccess eBooks, and are downloadable at no cost on the NC State website. Dr. Steer is a prolific author whose books are chock full of highly useful illustrations and photographs. The first five "Microwave and RF Design" books, volumes 1 through 5, cover a wide swath of ground with concentrations in radio systems, transmission lines, networks, modules, and amplifiers and oscillators. The final book, "Fundamentals of Microwave and RF Design," is a summary of the first five that will prove useful to newcomers in the field. Excerpts of the books' contents are quoted ...
 Fellow amateur radio enthusiast Russ Keller (KM4RHK), of Wake Forest, North Carolina, has designed and is selling his DMMCheck Plus test device for verifying the accuracy of digital multimeters, oscilloscopes, or other instruments which measure the provided parameters. This compact (2.5" x 2.2"), inexpensive board is battery powered and can be used to verify the accuracy of seven primary DMM functions. A very complete description of each function is provided on the DMMCheck Plus website. A certificate of measured values for each function is provided with the DMMCheck Plus. Re-measurement, if desired, is free for the first two years ...
 While company branding and the user interface have changed over the years since AppCAD first appeared on the Hewlett Packard (HP) website, it is still as handy a desktop tool as ever. The most recent incarnation was provided by Avago Technologies, which bought Broadcom in 2015 and then adopted its name. You can now download a free copy of AppCAD from the Broadcom website. Rather than do en extensive write-up about all the calculation screens in AppCAD, I've posted a sampling of screen shots. Amongst them are a Smith chart s-parameter plotter, a lumped element balun designer, a microstrip calculator, a mixer spurious product calculator, and thermal dissipation calculator. Since according to a popular saying a picture reportedly paints a thousand words ...
 Those of us whose were around in the RF industry in the 1990s and remember a very fine magazine entitled "Applied Microwave & Wireless." It was published by Noble Publishing Group. The Archive.org (aka the Wayback Machine, a la from Sherman and Mr. Peabody cartoon) website has an archive of 410 published articles (as of this writing) on a variety of topics including antennas, oscillators, filter design and tuning, direct conversion receivers, microstrip and stripline, RF link calculations, shielding, co-channel interference, power amplifiers, lightning protection, SAW devices, GPS, dielectric measurement, circuit and system computer simulation, transistor biasing, RF transformers ...
 If you visited the good folks at the QuinStar Technology booth at the IMS show in Boston this year (2019), you were probably offered one of the T-shirts shown here. As you might expect from a company of engineers and scientists, the design on the T-shirt includes a thinking exercise. Rumor has it that this is the first question put to interviewees. Can you decode the license plate message? I asked Ms. Carol Clasby, who probably handed you your T-shirt at IMS2019 (if you got one), whether someone at QuinStar actually has the license plate and she responded not yet, but maybe in the near future. I went to the California Department of Transportation website to see what such a license plate might look like. It allowed me to reserve the plate, although of course ...
 It seems impossible that you can buy Visio Professional 2019 and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for less than $10 each, but according to the research I did the offers seems to be legitimate. Evidently, sellers buy corporate subscriptions and then are licensed to distribute copies to it agents (we, the buyers). This is nothing new because I have seen it done for many years. After purchasing a product, you are provided with a hyperlink for downloading the software directly from the Microsoft.com website, and also an activation key. Heeding te old saying about if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn't, I decided to test the system. Back in March, I purchased one copy each of Visio Professional 2019 and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2019 for $5.99 and $9.99 ...
 My daughter, Sally, in addition to owning and operating a very successful horse riding school named Equine Kingdom Riding Academy, has a rather large eBay store she uses as a venue for selling items purchased at the local Goodwill "Bins" store. She often buys vintage toys with electronics features - sometimes working and sometimes not. A properly functioning vintage toy, be it a stuffed animal or a game of some sort, can make a huge difference in the resale price. When that is the case, she sends them home with me to attempt a repair. Many times the problem is corroded contacts from leaky batteries. A dental pick and some isopropyl alcohol usually solves the problem. When that doesn't work, it's time to open 'er up for a deeper look. Over the years I have found problems ranging ...
 There's a new online interactive Smith chart s-parameter plotter in town, and it goes by the name of QuickSmith. Justin Coulston, designer of QuickSmith, sent me an e-mail asking that I take a look at it. I did, and I like what he has done. Assuming that anybody reading this is already at least somewhat familiar with the Smith chart, this report will concentrate on the features of QuickSmith. Keep in mind while checking out QuickSmith for yourself that it is still in Beta phase, so your feedback to Justin will be appreciated ...
Coilcraft has been around as long as I can recall since beginning my electronics career in the 1970s. In fact, Coilcraft was founded in 1945 near Chicago to make custom coils for television sets. They began manufacturing a line of standard products in the 1970s - no doubt with supporting my budding career in mind ;-) Inductors and magnetics are their primary focus. Coilcraft has been an industry leader in surface mount components, and was one of the first to provide packaging that could be used by pick-and-place automatic PCB assembly ...  A couple days ago I posted an update on the Watkins-Johnson databook page that had an unauthorized gag graph titled, "WJ-G1/SMG1 Phase vs. VCTL vs. Frequency vs. Phase of the Moon." When RF Cafe visitor and sometimes contributor Dr. Marek Klemes* read that, he sent me a note about remembering this "Delayed Light Turn-Off" circuit from the Signetics 555/556 Timer Databook. It took a bit of creative Googling, but he managed to find the datasheet (to the right). The text was a bit washed out from the original low resolution scan, so I reproduced the labels (green). This Rube Goldberg-ish contraption works thusly: After a delay determined by the values selected for R1 and C1, the output of the NE555 timer goes high and causes resistor RL to heat up enough to ignite match M1. M1 subsequently lights the fuse on firecracker FC1, which has tied to its body a string that wraps around a pulley and holds a rock (which weighs precisely 2π pounds ...
12/7/2018 
Longtime RF Cafe visitor, electrical engineer, and occasional contributor Alan Dewey sent me a note yesterday saying a book for which he helped provide a large amount of research data has been published by authors Iain Dey and Douglas Buck. "The Cryotron Files: How the Inventor of the Microchip Put Himself in the KGB's Sights," is an extensive delve into the background of Dr. Dudley Allen Buck, whose son, Douglas, conducted an extensive investigation into his father's mysterious death that happened to coincide with the death of his colleague and two other scientists just days after being visited by Soviet computer experts. Dr. Buck was a superconductivity researcher during his short, highly productive life. A cryotron, BTW, is a superconducting switch that would make for very low power supercomputers if it could be made practical in IC form ... 11/20/2018  An advertisement for Mini-Circuits' DIY Vector Network Analyzer Kit appeared in the October issue of Microwaves & RF magazine. It is evidently the first of a planned series of University Projects. Billed as an attempt to "Bridge the gap between textbook theory and real-world measurement," Project No. 1-UVNA-63 targets college laboratories as low-cost means of procuring a high performance vector network analyzer (VNA) at a reasonable cost ($2,495.00). The frequency range is 100 MHz to 6 GHz. Having the student build the 1-UVNA-63 provides a familiarity with a block diagram level understanding of 2-port VNAs and gives hands-on experience with assembling RF components. Included are filters, directional couplers, a transceiver PCB (made by Vayyar) ...
11/1/2018  Take a look at this ARRA (Antenna & Radome Research Associates) attenuator advertisement that appeared in the September 2018 issue of Microwaves & RF magazine a tell me if it reminds you of something you might have seen in the 1960's through 1980's. That might not have been the intention, but seeing it sure triggered my nostalgia mechanism. Even the tag line, "When it comes to attenuators, nobody - but nobody - can fill our shoes," idiom, being somewhat dated, conjures up memories of vintage company slogans. Of course the black and white format feeds the perception. Maybe I'm wrong, but if it appeals to me for any reason, the ad designers have done their job ...
10/9/2018  Rohde & Schwarz has been publishing a series of good old-fashioned printed (aka hard copy) Pocket Guides on RF test and measurement topics. This latest one titled, "Key Characteristics of Signal Generators and Modulation Methods: Pocket Guide," arrived in my mailbox (the physical one at the curb, not Outlook). There are 116 pages chock full of an amazing amount of descriptions, equations, tables, and graphs. The main topic areas are analog, vector, and arbitrary (ARB) waveform generators, and analog and digital modulation methods. It also reviews associated topics like phase noise, VSWR, intercept points, etc. A sampling of them are reproduced below. You can get your own free copy by filling out the form on the R&S website ...
10/8/2018  Sitting in the waiting room in the local Jeep dealership, waiting for the technicians to do the annual inspection on the 2011 Patriot, I noticed a 12 volt car battery sitting on a table. At first I assumed it was just a sales pitch for a new battery, but then I noticed a bunch of small cables coming from its bottom edge. As you can see in the photo I took of it, those cables are mobile device charging cords with mating connectors for Apple, USB, and miniUSB ports. An Internet search did not turn up any of these things, so maybe Mopar engineers came up with it. Times sure have changed from when ...
6/18/2018  Rohde & Schwarz is offering at no cost a variety of reference charts (posters) for hanging on your lab or office wall, and some handy-dandy Pocket Guides. In the current age of (seemingly) paperless offices and laboratories, opening a cardboard package from R&S containing the pictured items caused me to wax nostalgic over the days when sales reps handed out such materials during workplace meetings and at trade shows. Wall charts are still fairly easily obtained, but the spiral-bound pocket guides are more rare. Maybe soon we'll be seeing the resurrection of cardboard slide rule calculators ...
3/14/2018  Mr. Oleg Sakharov, Director of the Center of Telecom. Technologies, LLC, recently sent me information on the MLinkPlanner software for performing microwave communications link design. Judging only from the provided screenshots and the online documentation, MLinkPlanner looks to be very user friendly and loaded with features. I downloaded the 7-day free trial and did a quick fictitious link between my house in Erie, PA, and the WBEN AM radio station in Buffalo, NY. My route is mostly over Lake Erie, so there was not much in the way of obstructions, other than the curvature of the earth ...
12/18/2017  Hyperlinks all around the Internet pointing to Hittite's infamous Mixer Spurious Product Calculator broke suddenly when Analog Devices swallowed up Hittite in 2014. The good news is that if you still want to use it, you can find it as the ADI Mixer-Spur Graphical Representation tool on the ADI website. However, Marki Microwave now has a much nicer Spur Calculator that you will want to consider. It provides both a Spur Web format and a Spectrum Analyzer format for presenting mixer spurious products. The interface is very user friendly both for the input and the output specification. The Spur Web screen uses a format pioneered ...
12/1/2017  QuickSmith, a creation of Nathan Iyer, has been around for a long time. It is without a doubt one of the most feature-filled examples of RF design software around. Nathan recently released a Web-based version of QuickSmith on a GitHub server, which means it works on any platform with a browser - desktop or mobile. Access is free, and you can save and reload your design files rather than losing your work once you leave the website. Being online also means that the latest version is always available. The screenshot to the right illustrates where to place series and parallel components, and where to access the sweep ...
8/30/2017  You might think the world doesn't need another RF basics book, but the fact is there are so many new people coming into the field that there is always room for one more - particular a well-done edition like "RF Basics Handbook" from Rigol Technologies. The PDF download is free, but you do need to fill out a submission form. A replication of the table of contents give you an idea of all the topics covered. The photos and drawings are very good quality. Of course the equipment used in the publication are representative of Rigol's product line, but that's to be expected ...
8/15/2017  Amateur radio operators take note: Heathkit, which in years past was a prime supplier of homebuilt ham radio gear, has just announced plans to manufacture its first piece of test equipment in three decades. "Now there's the Heathkit® HM-1002: Intuitive, intelligent, affordable, accurate measurement. The next-generation Heathkit® HM-1002 Precision RF Meter™ picks up where our venerable SWR / wattmeters of yesteryear -- and everyone else's -- stopped. Incredible new features, yet simple for beginners to assemble and understand. And you can build and maintain it yourself." ...
6/26/2017  Dr. Andrei Muller, progenitor of the world's first 3D Smith Chart software program, has teamed with a handful of able colleagues to release this commercial version of this paradigm-changing design and analysis tool. 3D Smith Chart enables you to visualize S-parameter data in ways not possible from the Flatland dweller's perspective that is the traditional 2D Smith chart. Flatland existed in a plane, and from an observer's perspective a 3-dimensional object entering the plane from along the Z-axis seemed to appear out of nowhere ...
5/22/2017  This back-page advertisement by Model Rectifier Corporation (aka MRC) appeared in the January 1972 issue of American Aircraft Modeler magazine. Note the cool collection of [now] vintage test equipment shown in support of testing the R/C system. The advertisement shows a rhombic antenna, the Dana 8015 RF frequency counter, Tektronix 7904 oscilloscope, HP spectrum analyzer, RF communications synthesizer RF generator, Anritsu precision field strength meter. I was 13 years old at the time, and anxiously watched for in the mailbox each month ...
4/17/2017  RF Cafe visitor Tony C., who is an engineer working for on of America's great, longtime manufacturers of green farm equipment, sent me a link to this unique memory IC released by Signetics on April 1, 1973. Being April 1, 2017, it seems to be an appropriate day to post the Signetics 25120 Fully Encoded, 9046 x N, Random access Write-Only Memory datasheet that per Wikipedia, "...was created 'as a lark' by Signetics engineer John G 'Jack' Curtis and was inspired by a fictitious and humorous vacuum tube datasheet from ..."
April 1, 2017  How many times have you dug through a drawer of coaxial connector adapters and found what seemed like every possible combination of TNCs, Ns, SMAs, TNCs, UHFs, SMBs, and <fill in the blank>s except the one you really need? Sometimes the reason is simply because all on hand are being used for something else and cannot be 'borrowed' for your use. Other times it is because the need never existed before. Usually, a quick search on the Internet will turn up exactly want you want, but for decent a quality adapter you will pay a stiff price - especially if it is a rare combination of connector types. The truth is, not often is a combination like QMA-Male-Right-Angle-to-TNC-Female-Bulkhead adapter or ...
7/15/2016  Just as the paperless office, predicted to quickly become a reality when personal computers were beginning to dominate the workplace and home in the 1980s, has yet to occur, neither has desktop software for high-end applications totally replaced online equivalents. Microsoft has made good progress in the last few years in moving part of their Office suite online, you still need a local copy of Visio, Project, and even their Visual Studio software development tools if you want to use them. Graphics and video editing software cannot be used efficiently online. The problem is mostly due to time latency between user input and software display response. Speed on the host server end is addressable with pumped up computing power and extra ...
7/7/2016 | 
