It's much easier to make a sensitive RF circuit work with "ugly"
construction than on a typical PC board. There are a couple of reasons.
One is that leads can generally be kept shorter. The second, and chief
reason, is the solid, continuous ground plane. The advantage of the
ground plane isn't capacitance reduction as you say, but much lower
ground inductance. In a typical PC board layout, currents from various
parts of a circuit have to flow through ground traces which can have
considerable impedance at RF. This causes voltage drops which are
related to each of the currents. The voltages are applied to the
connected circuits, resulting in crosstalk and feedback.

It's usually possible to get by with a fairly abbreviated ground system,
but it can take an awful lot of care and knowledge to do it -- I haven't
even run across a lot of otherwise skilled engineers who are good at it.
The average home constructor is much more likely to succeed on the solid
plane provided by "ugly" construction. It's not uncommon for an "ugly"
prototype to work well and a PC board version fail -- unless you have
the luxury of using a multiple-layer PC board where you can devote one
layer to being a solid ground plane. The chances of succeeding with a PC
depends heavily, of course, on the nature of the circuit -- some are
vastly more tolerant than others.

I personally like "ugly" construction also because it's much faster than
making a PC board and, if done right, can be as rugged. Of course the
advantages of a PC board are obvious when making multiple copies of a
project.

I know of what I speak -- I've spent a career designing electronic test
equipment, and do consulting in the EMC field (electromagnetic
compatibility, dealing with such issues as crosstalk and RFI). And I've
done a considerable amount of RF homebrewing.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Basil B. wrote:
Hello all

I've been doing a fair bit of internet reading about RF construction
projects. I'm still confused about something.

Most authors, including those in the ARRL Handbook, seem to espouse
"ugly construction" and a variant called Manhatten construction. I
understand that the reason is that these techniques minimize
capacitance by providing a large ground plane. Ugly construction seems
to also encompass perfboard construction with wire traces or direct
component-to-component connections. This seems to me to be not much
better than using pre-printed boards whose traces match, in geometry,
those of solderless prototyping boards.

I do understand that the solderless boards are inadequate for RF work,
but are the pre-printed perforated "protoboards" also inadequate.

Call it an OC tendency, but ugly construction is, well, ugly. Of
course, I want to use the best techniques for what I'm doing, and if UC
is the way to go, then that's what I'll do.

I'd appreciate your opinions on this.

Thanks
Basil B.