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Driving low impedance - RF Cafe Forums

The original RF Cafe Forums were shut down in late 2012 due to maintenance issues - primarily having to spend time purging garbage posts from the board. At some point I might start the RF Cafe Forums again if the phpBB software gets better at filtering spam.

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mmf
Post subject: Driving low impedance Posted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 2:21 am

Lieutenant

Joined: Mon Nov 23, 2009 1:21 am
Posts: 1
Hello,

I'm no RF expert and could use some help. I need to drive a single-turn coil over the range of 5 to 200 MHz. I am using a DDS to generate my sine wave and have used a PGA IC meant for driving CATV cable to drive the coil. Since the amp is meant for driving 75 ohm loads, I have quite a voltage drop when driving the low impedance of my coil. I would like to put more power into the coil and wondered how I might do this. I can get almost 1 VRMS across the coil now but would like get about 2.5 VRMS. I want a fairly flat amplitude versus frequency curve into this coil as it is used to excite a system that has it's resonances sensed. It seems like RF amps are all designed for the standard 50 or 75 ohm loads. Any help is appreciated.


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nubbage
Post subject: Re: Driving low impedancePosted: Mon Nov 23, 2009 4:10 am

General


Joined: Fri Feb 17, 2006 12:07 pm
Posts: 218
Location: London UK
Hi mmf
you will probably have more success by using a high-current differential line driver, also used for CATV, but not the single-ended unbalanced 50ohm type.
These are designed for high current drive into a twisted pair cable, so you connect the one turn coil across the two balaced outputs.
Also recall that discrete component audio amplifiers used a complementary pair emitter-follower circuit to drive 4 ohm loudspeakers. If you design a similar arrangement but using HF/VHF techniques for component choice and circuit layout, it should be possible to drive significant current through the coil and achieve the objective. I have used this idea to drive a low resistance bridge to measure low values of resistance accurately.
It might be more helpful to think in terms of current and mmf rather than voltage in this low impedance situation.

_________________
At bottom, life is all about
Sucking in and blowing out.



Posted  11/12/2012
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