T&L Publications

What tools do you have at your disposal? My first intuition would be to design a solution in verilog and use an inexpensive programable logic device (PLD) to solve the problem. Another equally good solution, depending on your experience and acccess to development tools would be to use a microcontrol...

A 555 timer provides a square wave output. This is unacceptable as a reference oscillator for RF because a square wave contains harmonics on frequencies other than that of interest; Particularly odd order harmonics (i.e. 3*f, 5*f, 7*f, etc.). Another potential problem with the solution is that 555s ...

If you're not running the amp for hours at a time, you could put a 10 - 20A supply in parallel with a car battery and a large bypass cap.

IEEE Potentials reader?<p>

Dallas Semiconductor (http://www.dalsemi.com - UPDATED URL: https://www.wellpcb.com/Appetite-for-Acquisition-How-Maxim-Integrated-Bought-Its-Way-Into-the-NASDAQ-Top-100.html) sells (and samples) battery charger timers. This is not necessary if you simply want a manually timed constant current source...

Ebay has loads of 'em. Most come from Europe and cost roughly $3 - $10 plus shipping.

just to mention it, Those caps produce a 26J discharge at 80v, and a 105J discharge at 160v, which is quite an impressive firework in and of itself.

I have just been experimenting with that very idea...<p>I drilled a 0.5" hole 1.5" into a 3/4" * 1.5" * 2" aluminum block, as wel as a 1/8" hole perpendicular to the first, at the closed end of the first, such that their bottoms open up to one another. A rough cross-sec...

Many cordless phones now operate on spread-spectrum technology. Spread spectrum encodes data with pseudo-noise before transmitting to lower the power per bandwidth, while retaining the overall power. The advantage with respect to range is a digital gain. With the redundant data, a few bits can be dr...

Would a microcontroller be fast enough? Atmel, Microchip, TI, Motorola, and others all makret inexpensive ($2 - $10) microcontrollers that can give you multi-channel analog sample rates up to 2MHz in some cases. Also, Lattice Semiconductor offers programable analog devices that could easily handle y...

You might take a moment to turn over a few electrical devices and look for the UL symbol. You will find that every device you look at will have this symbol on it somewhere. The symbol means that it has been inspected and approved as a safe electrical device. The risk associated with not having a dev...