You made a slight error: Between two traces in a PCB, the dielectric constant is not really 1. The volume of space between the traces that gets used by the capacitance involves some "fringing" making it use some space that is inside the PCB. It doesn't change your argument but if you measure on a PCB you will see the capacitance is a bit higher than you expect.
you're absolutely right! I was doubting weather I should go into that level of detail, because, as you said, it does not change the argument. Well spotted! :-)
Thank you. This was a clear explanation of issues with ground-planes which presented a complex issue making it relatively intuitive. Sounds like there are a lot more goodies in your checklist. I'd love a copy.
The physical layout and routing of PCB designs where RF is present are 100% vital. I just completed my first design of a board and the layout and routing were scrutinized just as much as the actual schematic design itself. Awesome video! Im will definitely be checking out your other videos and look forward to future ones as well.
SUBSCRIBED!!! I am a retired electrical engineer and did mostly digital but have dedicated my remaining heartbeats to attempting to master RF design as best I can. So, I enjoyed your video very much and appreciate the modeling and measurements that you made. Also, looks like this is a new channel so I hope you do mainly RF (at least for me) Many years ago, I got pushed into designing a 2-layer RF PCB. So, I just put the GP on the top; circuit traces on the bottom and used TH ccomponents. The board worked amazingly fine and later I learned that this was the correct way to do it, In my mind, it was the only way to get a continuous and contiguous GP! Anyway, looking forward to further videos... 73!
Thanks a lot, hope I'm improving your 'retirement experience' :-D You can get the checklist here: www.hans-rosenberg.com/checklist Best regards, Hans Oh, my 3rd video is out, all on RF! Hope you enjoy that one as well.
Hi Hans, you started a channel to educate people. Cool! Nice to see that you share some of your experience 👍🏻 Regards, Ron (now lecturing engineering at NHL Stenden)
Hey Ron, leuk te horen! Ik ga alles proberen te delen wat ik geleerd heb sinds ik op mijn 8ste begonnen ben met electronica.... kan een jaartje of wat gaan duren :-) Groetjes, Hans
As a teacher starting to teach PCB design to high school students (without an electrical engineering background), these and Phils Labs videos are amazing. Thank you so much! Please send me the checklist! Thanks!
Haha, great :-). Link is in the description. If you want to get your co-workers trained to a whole other level: I'm building a course based on the document at the moment which goes into far far more detail than I can in this document. Maybe your boss can pay for that for your co-workers :-) www.hans-rosenberg.com/product_development_course Best regards, Hans
No tengo idea que camino vas a tomar con electronica de RF.........pero simplemente por ser RF te voy a seguir. Hay tan poco material de RF bien explicado que tu canal se vuelve valioso.
I definitely appreciate that you are sharing your experiences that you remember and Learned from. Thank you. Learning is about making mistakes; recognizing and learning from them and then pass on that knowledge to those that are willing to listen and learn. Those that were taught to stay away from FIRE never had a good barbecue!
Bravo; very good explanations! In the 1970’s and 1980’s as a hobbyist I had several friends that were printed circuit board designers. They said that designing pcb’s was an ART. And they prided themselves on designing their pcb’s to look aesthetically pleasing. They would arrange all the resistor in nice neet rows, Then they would blame the circuit routing software on why their circuit boards didn’t work!
What a great video! Through my work in Magnetic Resonance hardware development, I encounter RF circuitry quite often. Now I finally know why those PCBs have these rows of vias following a transmission line on a PCB :D
Excellent video that combines theory and practice, thanks a lot! As a student, I've been told many times by many different people that the integrity of the ground plane is very important when designing high-frequency circuits, but I never really understood it from a theoretical aspect (because I thought it's something that is really hard to analyze without the help of computer simulation). This video gives me the courage and shows me the correct route to actually analyze such problems quantitatively. Many thanks! "Send me the Checklist"
Thanks! You know the thing is: it's not hard at all, it's just that almost noone understands it fundamentally so they cannot explain it correctly. This happens to be one of my all time favourite subjects :-) so I can show how easy it really is. In the next video I'll show some examples of where it get's a little harder to quantify what is best on a 2 layer, but I also have a solution for those 2 layers.
Wow, really good information, thank you for putting this series on RU-vid! I’d love to look over your checklist and add the items I’m missing! Please send it over!
this is such a clear explanation of the importance of ground planes. focusing on the current path in your explanations really helped my understanding. i know you just started uploading on youtube but you deserve a lot more attention :) also, send me the checklist
Dear Hans, Nice video. You did a great job of backing up the theory with actual measurements with a VNA. As an electronic consultant myself I can't count the number of times I was able to fix client issues simply by having a clean, unbroken ground plane. You have awesome skills in explaining things nicely. Good Luck with your new channel! I am sure it will be a great one going ahead in practical electronics.
Hi, thanks a lot for your very positive reply :-) This was my first video and the plan is to do this at least for 1 year and share everything I've learned about electronics since I was 8 years old (that's when I started, that was 42 years ago). This will probably take more than a year ;-)
Coming back to your remark that you solved a lot of issues fixing a ground plane: It's really amazing how underestimated / misunderstood the importance of ground planes is, that's why I wanted to start with this one. Even good electronics engineers often underestimate this one.
Thanks, link is in the description. I'm also building a course based on this document where students do a hands-on design from a conceptual schematic to a finished board. This is a paid course.: www.hans-rosenberg.com/product_development_course . best regards, Hans
So rare to see this level of detail and explanation to such a vital and intrinsic part of our daily lives, electronic design. I was due to do some LVDS work and was somewhat nervous of board layout challenges. A copy of your checklist would be really welcome.....Thank you
Thanks for the enthusiasm! This brings up a sensitive point with me, I'm really really disappointed with my electronics education. All they taught me was insanely complicated maths, and 1% of electronics. And I never never needed that complicated stuff. High school maths is all you need to develop the most complicated circuits if you understand what you're doing and use a simulator for the calculations. You can download the checklist here: www.hans-rosenberg.com/checklist Best regards, Hans
Thanks for the encouragement! Theory is very nice but I truly believe something when I see it for real :-) You can download it here: www.hans-rosenberg.com/checklist Best regards, Hans
Always great for my ego to hear that someone thinks I'm smart :-) I cannot say no to please :-D You can get it here: www.hans-rosenberg.com/checklist Best regards, Hans
Amazingly clear explanation of a subject with much "mystery and handwaving" around it. Please send me the checklist! And you have a new subscriber who will watch all your vids!
Thanks a lot. My experience is that even experienced electronics engineers still think this is some sort of 'black magic', but it's really very simple if you understand the fundamentals :-). It's just that not many people understand the basics of it. Link is in the description. Best regards, Hans
Thank you for the very clear explanation of the return path, how an obstruction affects it, and the impedance graph illustrations. And please send me the checklist.
I have been working on analog and digital radios for years now, more on the software side, but still touching on hardware a bit. I feel like I learned more in 15 mins on HW design than in 10 years of work. You are amazing. Thanks for the checklist too ! edit: i cant get the checklist, my address is refused. Your regex is probably refusing the '-' character in it. It would be great if you could fix this.
Hi, wow, thanks for the compliments :-) I just tried to download it, that works with my address. About the regex, I'm not sure, the page is made and handled by the Kajabi platform so I cannot control that. Can you try again? Otherwise, please send me an email info@hans-rosenberg.com with the remark that you would like to have the checklist. Best regards, Hans
Hi Hans, please send me the checklist. Well done on making the issues clear and easily understandable. Ive been a tech for 40+ years and found it valuable.
Hello Hans, you placed some interesting videos. As a fellow electronics designer it is always good to learn new or already, some times forgotten, rules. Looking forward to read and use your checklist. Please send me the checklist.
This is not just a radio freq thing, I build valve amps for hifi and guitar. For decades I’ve seen people cover the insides of guitars and amps with foil tape which is ungrounded and it picks up so much noise, so then they paint everything with graphite paint and remove all the top and bottom end of the freq range! Then they install active pickups [facepalm] I apply the same practices as you and have gorgeous sounding guitars and hifi :o) And for anyone reading this, I have decades of experience but still watch videos like and read books this as a refresher, its good practice.
Indeed, I know, I'm also a long time audio builder (30 years). My experience is that a single groundplane greatly improves sound. Don't even separate left and right grounds, the current will not run in the circuitry from the other channels since that is the long way around which return current will never take. So you're totally safe to do that. Also never separate digital and analog grounds in a DAC, you'll run common mode interference current right through your da converter chip which is not good either. They have separate analog and digital ground pins, but on the actual die, they are connected.
Excellent video. The lenght and the depth of your presentation perfect. I would have one recommendation, please provide link in your description on the various tools that you are using like te micro strip loss calculations. Please continue your nice work.
Thanks a lot. I'm nervous to put links to third parties with respect to copyright issues. Even putting that thing in my video feels scary. The legal rules there seem to be a mess for an engineer like me. However, I always just google 'microstrip calculator' and you get a whole list of em :-)
Thank you for sharing such an informative video! I found it incredibly helpful and would greatly appreciate it if you could provide a copy of the checklist. Thanks again!
Thank you for that video. Very informative. You said „by placing the solder blob just under the transmission line you proved that the return current flows directly only under the line“. Strictly speaking that is not proven here, since there are other explanations that might explain the measured result. E.g. if you see the obstruction as an antenna which you have tapped in the middle with the solder blob, this would explain the result too. What might be interesting to further prove your statement would be to move the solder blob up or down in steps and compare the results. Again: really well done! Thanks! ☺
Great idea indeed, I thought about moving the blob as well or asymetrically, to prove it will take the shortest route in that case. Maybe I'll make a short video on this. Or maybe I make a 'viewer reqeust' video in this playlist, I've had some other interesting remarks as well which I could easily address with a measurement.
Hi, I would love a copy of the checklist. The video was really interesting. Things I probably knew at some level, but never looked at in a systematic way.
Link is in the description. I'm also making a paid course based on this document. www.hans-rosenberg.com/product_development_course . Best regards, Hans
Hello sir, great teaching in your videos. You are clearly knowledge and explain things with just the right amount of information, with good organization, and at a good pace. How does one get a copy of your book? Also, I have been using LTSpice for three years, designing models and sub-circuit files for projects at home. Is there another software with a reasonable price point for this kind of circuit simulation that may be more convenient or polished than LTSpice?
Thanks a lot, nice to see that female engineers do exist :-) Links are in the description (working on my domain, so check out both, one of them will certainly work), best regards, Hans
You're welcome, I plan to do this for 1 year and then see if this is a way of living or not :-) You can get it here: www.hans-rosenberg.com/checklist BR, Hans
Don't need the checklist, created one myself in the last 30 years of so, lol... Being a HAM operator building RF amplifiers myself for VHF, UHF an SHF (DATV) I can only agree with your findings. What did struck me some time ago is how RF energy is moving through the copperlines on the PCB, well it's NOT, it's moving through the PCB between the striplines and groundplane and vice versa through the diëlectricum! Nice video Hans, best regards Richard (PA1RAM).
By the way, forget to mention. The last example you gave, it's called a Wave Guide, actually a Coplanar Wave Guide, am using it all time these days in my RF amplifiers. And yes there are some good calculators available on the net.
Indeed, I know the name. Forgot to mention it. I'm going to make a video on characteristic lines at some point. Good to hear your experience matches mine.
@@HansRosenberg74it could be a Minecraft reference. Minecraft has a huge modding community. Some mods add machines which require energy to operate. There is no energy mechanic in the base game, so mods often add their own energy systems (usually some simplified version of real life electricity with cables, generators, some sort of accumulator for energy storage, etc.). RF and EU were two popular energy systems added by mods. The problem is that they are incompatible with each other (you can't power an EU machine with RF and vice versa), so people often had to build RF/EU converters in order to power machines from one mod with generators from a different mod.
