Owen Duffy wrote:
. . .
As part of my FSM project for measuring BPL emissions, I went
searching the net for kits for RF step attenuators, and all that I
found were kits that had gone obsolete, no longer available. Today it
should be a piece of cake to do a low cost kit with miniature
switches, precision surface mount resistors etc... but we as a
community are apparently not sufficiently interested in quantifying
things these days.

A step attenuator which is completely adequate for HF and can easily
resolve 1 dB can be made from a few cheap slide switches, some PC board
material, and a handful of ordinary 5% quarter watt resistors. Detailed
instructions can be found in numerous sources, including the Web -- a
Google search brought a large number of hits, the first of which was
http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/pdf/9506033.pdf. But I'm afraid that this
level of homebrewing is beyond the interest if not the ability of the
majority of today's amateurs.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL