Telamon wrote:

Must be nice to have the circuits you work on in a controlled RF
environment inside a metal box. My employer expects the same on open
circuit boards up to 10 GHz and since it's work it's no fun.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California

I did 11 Ghz work on CARS equipment It was used for a TV STL, but it
was grandfathered. I have worked from DC to 11 Ghz but most of that is
behind me because of my health.

I did a lot of RF work at the board level at Microdyne, before they
were installed in the machined aluminum modules. We built telemetry
receivers, any band, any bandwidth, any modulation scheme. Have you
worked with FQPSK modulation?

Everyone told me that the 4 GHz equipment couldn't be repaired
outside the factory and there were no schematics or service data. I
built my first 4 GHZ signal generator out of an old Drake C-band to 70
Mhz down converter. I removed the filtering on the tuning voltage and
used a better Op amp to drive the varactor, then fed the video to the op
amp. My quick test was to wave the feed past a fluorescent tube and
watch the change in the noise on a video monitor.

The C-band generator I have now was custom built by Microdyne for
their production lines when they were in the Sat TV business. I think I
have the only one left. The others were destroyed when they shut the
line down, but they missed one and another guy at the plant grabbed it
off the top of the dumpster.

As far as work being no fun, I always took the hardest jobs coming
down the production line and found ways to make them easier to do. I
might be strange, but I liked the challenges. I have several hundred
semiconductor databooks in my collection, and thousands of of datasheets
filling up a new 80 GB hard drive.

--
Former professional electron wrangler.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida