On Sunday 10 October 2004 10:51 pm, Robert Monsen did deign to grace us with
the following:

Steve Evans wrote:
On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 14:01:44 +0100, Paul Burridge
wrote:


Well then it appears Reg's hunch was right. The transistor in question
has an input capacitance of just under 3pF, so the 0.4uH inductor
forms a parallel tuned circuit with it at 145Mhz. This prevents the
input signal from partially shunted to ground via the input
capacitance were the inductor not there. The idea is to allow as much
of the input signal as possible to develop across the BE diode to
maximise input impedance and gain. The input capacitance is in
parallel with this diode and bypasses RF signals around it - which you
*don't* want. Will a 1uH work instead? Do the maths and find out. But
if you don't know the inductor's Q that probably won't help much...


Sorry, but none of this makes sense to me. There's no diode involved
so I don't know where you get that from. And what's "input
capacitance" and "Q"?
Do try to speak in plain English!

Possibly surprisingly, all that jargon actually qualifies as English!
It's just that it's, well, jargon. :-)


Steve


The transistor acts like a tiny capacitor from base to emitter, in
addition to its other jobs. Thus, an inductor in series with the base
will act like a bandpass filter at

f = 1/(2*pi*sqrt(L*C))

An inductor and capacitor with the same values in parallel will act like
a bandstop filter at that frequency.

Q is the "quality or merit factor" of the inductor, and is computed by
dividing the 'reactance' (or AC resistance) of the inductor by the DC
resistance *at the frequency in question*; it will generally be
different at different frequencies. Q is really the ratio of reactive
power in the inductance to the real power dissipated in the resistance,
and can be computed by using the formula:

Q = 2*PI*f*L/ri

where f is frequency, and ri is the resistance of the coil at f. You buy
inductors with a given Q range.

For an LC resonant circuit, the Q of the inductor will affect the 'Q' of
the resulting resonance, which simply means that with a bigger Q, the
passband or stopband will be wider.

You were doing so good up to this point. ;-)

The Q of a resonant circuit is
defined as the resonant frequency divided by the width of the passband.

Oh, OK - you've fixed it here.

Cheers!
Rich