You don’t see them much anymore, but there was a time when any hobbyist who dealt with RF probably had a grid dip meter. The ...

Anyone who’s worked with older tube-based equipment will be familiar with the type of vintage electrolytic capacitor which integrated several capacitors into one can. Long obsolete, they can be bought ...

With no external components, a 555 can be turned into an oscillator that runs typically in the range of 1 to 2.5mHZ –or who needs a timing capacitor? It is essentially a stripped down version of the ...

Any PN junction diode can be used as a variable capacitor in reverse biased mode, as well as in the forward biased mode before the knee voltage. The capacitance is usually very small as the junction ...

Starting a crystal oscillator fast in an IoT node is an art: the high Q needed for stability means they take milliseconds to get going, just to transmit a 128μs Bluetooth LE packet, and power is at a ...

Broadcast engineer Scott Todd recently found that a 40-year-old Broadcast Electronics FX-30 FM exciter needed recapping badly. Replacing all the dried-out electrolytic capacitors can be daunting.

Fig. 1: Spurious emissions seen on the exciter RF output. One of the biggest hassles in maintaining older equipment is getting it repaired when it fails. A lot of companies don’t even want to deal ...

This Idea for Design shows how proper component selection can help reduce startup time for gated oscillators. 3. The scope image shows the CMOS gated oscillator with no startup delay. The yellow line ...

After delving into Texas Instrument’s crystal-replacing bulk acoustic wave (BAW) oscillator recently, Electronics Weekly is taking a look at an advanced version of the humble RC oscillator, reported ...

This file type includes high resolution graphics and schematics. Capacitor-based charge pumps (or Q-pumps) generally aren’t useful for sourcing large amounts of current, but they work well in niche ...