If you want a technique that both looks good and is RF tolerant, try
using double sided board and small pieces of cheap plastic insulation
tape as resist. This applies to through hole parts of course - if you
want to use SM you will have to use dead bug or professionally made
PCBs. You will have to think out your layout carefully before you start
- do this on paper. You can always go back and styart again if it is all
wrong

The board must be scrupulously clean - use steel wool for this and dont
touch with fingers afterwards.

You can do through hole ICs by cutting a matrix of tape from a single
piece on the target board and removing the scrap from beween pads with
fine forceps.

Cut small squares and strips of tape from sections laid out on another
piece of scrap board for traces, resistors, capacitors and transistors.
Cut the tape sections with a sharp blade such as a Stanley knife
Using fine forceps, lift these and place in your desired layout on the
target board as pads and connections on the bottom side. Press down
firmly with another tool to stick

Cover the top completely with tape as a ground plane.

Etch the board in Ferric Chloride.

Remove all the pieces of tape

Drill holes through the pads with a suitable size PCB drill from the
bottom - a small drill press is useful as you will tend to break drills
otherwise

Any pads connected to ground can be left so that the component lead can
be simply soldered to the ground plane, while those that must be
insulated are countersunk carefully on the top side to remove a small
ring of copper - be careful not to drill right through - use a drill at
slow revolutions, or even by hand in a T chuck.

Scrub again with steel wool and spray with PCB lacquer

With practice you can make quite complex boards - I did a complete
triband HF SSB/QRP transceiver using this technique some years ago. I
have used some SM components such as 1206 resistors and capacitors,
combined with through hole parts on occasion.

Richard


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.