This article plunges you into the mesmerrizing world of early radio technology through the assembly and analysis of a DIY spark gap transmitter. This project offers a practical insight into the fascinating dynamics of damped harmonic oscillators and explains charasteristics such the logarithmic decrement, decay rate, damping factor, q factor, and beyond. Prepare to spark your curiosity in a technology that once revolutionized global communication.
High voltage power supplies can open interesting doors to research topics such as laser, x-ray, spark gap transmitters. And many other specialized niches. Unfortunately, laboratory grade high voltage power supplies are rather costly. Luckily, there is a much less expensive way to put high voltage experiments into the hobbyists reach. This article shows how to build an inexpensive and adjustable 5 kV to 30 kV high voltage supply from a commercial laser supply.
This article shows how to build a simple Triplexer (Diplexer plus integrated DC Bias-T) for use with commercial TV LNBs for QO-100 or X-band microwave experiments.
This article continues my newly acquired interest in implementing digital signal processing algorithms on the Arduino GIGA R1 by showing how to implement a tremolo effect algorithm in software.
This article shows how to approximate the behaviour of a regular diode in a mathematical equation and how to subsequently implement the behaviour in software. The DSP algorithm can be modified to implement different topologies, such as single diode clipping, dual diode symmetrical soft clipping or asymmetrical clipping.
Ideally, the impedance of PCB traces should be matched to the load and source impedances. This becomes especially important in high-frequency and high-speed digital PCB designs. Various rules of thumb are available to determine the critical length at which a PCB trace should be treated as a transmission line. Below this critical length, an impedance mismatch can safely be ignored. Or can it?
Choosing the right etchant for home made PCBs could be a science on its own. Some people prefer ferric chloride, some advocate for sodium persulfate and I personally prefer hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide. This article shows how to use a mixture of hydrochloric acid and hydrogen peroxide in a safe and controllable manner.
Due to the popularity of the QO-100 geostationary amateur radio communication satellite, precision GPS reference frequency sources (GPSDO) are becoming more and more common in home labs. The desire to derive different, fixed frequency signals from a GPSDO has similarly been increasing as different devices requiere different reference clocks with different frequencies. Therefore, this article is taking a closer look at the VersaClock 6E devices from Renesas.