KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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Build your own resistor load bank

Posted: 06 Aug 2020 05:27 PM PDT
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kb6nu...m_medium=email


Ive written many blog posts about power supplies and electronic loads for
AMETEK Programmable Power. This has been interesting to do, and Ive learned
a fair amount about power supplies and electronic loads. So much so, Id
really like to get an electronic load of my own. The only problem is that
theyre still a bit out of my price range.

A couple of days ago, though, I ran across the article, Versatile Multistep
Resistor Load Bank is Simple and Modular in electronic design. Its a
relatively simple design that consists of a number of resistors and
switches, as shown in the figure below.



R1 R5 are all the same value, and in this configuration, you can realize
12 different values, from R/4 to 2R. Heres how you would set the switches
to get these resistance values:



The right-most column on this chart shows the values youd realize when R =
1000 Ω.

As the author notes, you can cascade load banks to get even more values.
You could also build more than one load bank with different resistance
values. If you used 100 Ω resistors, the lowest resistance value would be
25 Ω, and with 10 Ω resistors, the lowest value would be 2.5 Ω.

This looks like it could be a very useful project to build, and the
opportunities to be creative with the packaging are endless.

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