Manhattan Circuit Construction Technique for Homebrew Ham Radios 

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Than is point-to‐point wiring or components to same points also better for amps i take it. ( like the 60s gitar-tubeamps build. With a hardboard layout ,one row of point on top and one row at other end everything 'zig-zag' to many common points . Everything as short in distance as possible the tube wire twined and solid metal casing were al ground/mass conects to. Or is this tech in vid essentially different?

Will this board somehow give me a “ground” while living in a Waikiki high rise that has no real ground with all the PVC that’s been used for plumbing repairs? 🤔

For those wondering, this guy's arrogance places courtesy and good manners well beyond their knowledge level.

There's pretty much zero advantage of this over just etching a circuit on a pcb with a ground copper pour. Less wasted time and money too

I did too. I think the point of this construction is to have a good ground plain for high frequency or low noise applications. I wouldn't use super glue though.

@@BlankBrainpcb has two sides. You could just not cut into the other side. Drill holes, go through, solder. This video already mounts stuff on the surface. PCB makes this easier. I like wires in the air. Nothing has lower k.

That's far better than this nonsense.

​@@Bobsmith-yf9oyThis ground plane technique allows circuits to work up to high uhf bands and lower microwaves.. with many other techniques one has to really know rf pcb design.. I've never had a problem with unstable circuits..also it's quite easy to manage return currents to minimize emi. But yes..not my go to way to make other type of circuits at home

@@Bobsmith-yf9oy RF design is often quite an iterative process. Ofcourse if you use a tested schematic from someone else, etching would work very well. But many HAMs design their own circuitry from scratch for components they have on hand. Usually you draw up something, and start correcting values, adding extra components, moving them around etc until your circuit does what you want it to do. Simulating doesn't work anymore here, paracitic inducantces and capacitances play a large role now too. Obviously most of these cases you need only one of such device, you already made something that's probably quite sturdily built, so there's no point to go through the whole process to etch a PCB anymore. It's a super popular technique that's been in use for decades for prototyping. Just go dig up some pictures of circuit design techniques from engineers like Bob Pease, maybe one of the most influential analog engineers in the silicon domain to have ever lived, he'd build discrete chip designs just like this technique to debug everything before translating it into a chip, a lot of them still being in production today. I personally have built equipment with this technique that's been going for over a decade now, weekly use, never had any trouble because it was mechanically inferior.

Doesn't work with solid metal, which matters because sometimes people will use the metal of a case as part or all of the ground, while you can pretty much always cut any copper-clad that you have into small pieces for use as the "islands" in Manhatten style.

A relative is Dead-Bug style, where essentially you glue down the sonductive top of an IC, then solder to it's legs. Dead bug is highly compatible with Manhatten style.

You can also use a laser to vaporize the bits of copper you don't need. It's a bit less of a mess, but the equipment buy in is a lot more.

Would probably have a little lower capacitance than "Manhattan" construction.

I used this technique for a radio project I built many years ago. It worked very well. I drew the grid of lines onto the board, then used a hacksaw blade to cut away the lines leaving isolated squares on the board. Then soldered each component in place on the appropriate squares. And it worked !

@@user-eg3yv3xr7s Back in high school I used a slightly different method. I'd score the board with a utility knife then uses a laminate cutting knife to cut away the copper. They made a nice V cut through the copper as it was pulled.

@@miket2120 ; That's great !! It's always so cool to build a project entirely by hand from scratch and have it work !!

My Heathkit projects still work and look a lot better I do want a new digital oscilloscope but my Heathkit is an old friend

Manhattan style is great for RF projects since you have that massive ground plane. Using protoboard can sometimes create parasitic capacitance that you might not want

Breadboards under the plastic have big ground plains and positive power rails... Works just as good and if you need a bigger ground for signal you can literally just add a chunk of thin copper tape and wire it to the ground rail.. ​@@JonathanKayne

About 40 years ago, at my start in radio, I used the same technics ... 😊

​@@michaellegg9381Absolutely not, breadboards are pretty much the worst possible choice for any high speed digital or RF projects. They have considerable parasitic capacitance between each row and they don't have anything approaching a ground plane.

So a ground plane is going from very low resistance to very high resistance without much of a gradient in between. So copper, mirror polish surface , air. And most parts need a pin soldered to it anyway. Just, these parts are all so huge. Those long Leads have uFarrads of inductivity.

​@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtyou mean nHenry...

​@@ArneChristianRosenfeldtThe rule of thumb is 1nH/mm, so no, none of these components have microhenries of inductance in their leads.

radio with no power source.. wasn't that just a germanium diode on two long wires and a crystal speaker? I think that was for longwave stations?

​@@tigerchills2079With a suitable antenna and careful construction you can build a crystal set to receive short wave.

I don’t know. Why do people from the UK add an “f” sound to the pronunciation of Lieutenant?

@lizlilly6756 I have no idea. It's crazy.

"Sodder" is how my Canadian dad said it back in the early '80s. He worked at IBM and got his job with no education because he passed their entrance test due to having electronics as a hobby as a kid and workiing in an electronics shop aa a teenager. He later became head of computer security for the biggest bank in the country and kept an eye on what hackers were capable of overcoming. "Sodder" is therefore the historical pronounciation.

Called a 'hole punch'

You can use cut-up bits of copper-clad as the "islands" if you want, and a conductive case as the ground plain.

You can use the entire case as the ground plain.

​@@absalomdraconis Ground plane.

You get a solid ground plane and you can minimise component lead lengths (not so much in this video!).

I learned building gitar tubeamps. We used to call it Point-to-point wiring. That is similar i take it ?

@@peeniewalli yes, except that instead of thumbnails you wired to the socked connectors of tube sockets. and wired the various other components as resistors, and capacitors directly to them. breadboarding is more from a later age where you used much smaller and lighter components like transistors. also when doing point -to-point wiring often you created intermediate points to solder to with, for example, strips of isolating material that had metal contact points attached to them.

@@martindejong3974 ah. Ok. I think we had combination. A board(made of(?)) about 80mm×200mm were we would punch a row of small metal rings on the top&bottem. There the resistors & elco's placed . The sockets indeed on the body/casing with twined pairs of wire. I think we basically copied 60s amps. We had our own transformers made to our specification.(hole lot a work to put them stacks of metal to make transformers metal casing, since we only got the coils delivered😁). Nice experience it was. I remember we also build some harmonica foot‐pedal tube(pre‐)amps.

You have a fibreglass PCB insulating the glue from the heat, and a large area of copper sinking any heat away. It works just fine.

You don't have to design and order a PCB, so you can construct circuits immediately. This also gives a better ground plane for HF design as even on a double sided PCB with through hole components the ground plane has to be broken for every connection not going to ground.

No it isn't. Ever heard of veroboard? How do you mount a 555 onto this?

​@@Bobsmith-yf9oyEver tried to use veroboard to make high frequency RF connections? It's useless. Even the original 555 with it's nasty shoot through problem on the output stage can be problematic without a solid ground and good supply decoupling. You mount ICs either dead bug (for through hole) or on the small IC adapter PCBs glued down.

Good for prototyping. No need to waste time on etching and where to ground.

Though this isn’t a prototype, but follows a text book.

Isn’t it a wet production process? How do you clad only a single side?

Double sided PCB stock is easier to find than single sided these days, but you are correct that single sided could be used.

Someone ought to build a board of just such capacitors, meaaure the capicatance of the entire board in Farads, then divide by the number of little 7x7 mm squares, and figure out the Farads if each little pad. Are you available to do the research?

Yes, the capacity between layers of pcb is used in modern consumer electronics to match impedance. Design tools help you.

The L is silent in the US 😬

Yes. Look at a random schematic you find in the internet. You will be surprised how many components have a ground pin to them somewhere in the path.

Easy way to construct a ground plane for the entire circuit without having to design and construct a multi-layer printed circuit board.

American Solder

The continuous copper layer acts as a ground plane for all of the grounds in the project as well as an RF ground plane that keeps noise suppressed.

@@BillRehbockit can become part of a Faraday cage when solder a dome of sheet metal of this all. Open up a commodore C64 to see an example.

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Agreed. (I worked for Jack and Sam, btw :-) The point of this style is for quick circuit prototyping and keeping noise suppressed. Nowadays, if you want a quick PCB, desktop CNC is an option, too, but the style depicted by the OP is a cool old-school technique that's quick and reliable. ... though maybe not so applicable to SMD components ;-)

Can I get a 4 layer PCB, where the inner layers are close to each other and supply power? Then I want an air channel spacer layer for low k and a again a thin outer layer to carry the traces.

That's a different thing. Like an IC upside down and components soldered either directly to or with wiring.

It's because it's built on a grid, like Manhattan.

I have used "dots" instead of squares. I have extra double sided and single sided board, I just use a heavy duty hole punch to punch out a bunch of pads. Only thing is if your working on something that is picky, the circuit board pads will have a small capacitance to ground, but most time its nothing to worry about.

I don’t think that you can print copper. Maybe you could hammer it like gold? A robot which can bend wires would be cool. Maybe it could operate in pure H2 atmosphere for oxygen free copper. Then crossing wires can be welded easily. Wire ends are cut so that they expose 45° flat surfaces. Bend them up, to level pads for the parts. Just, how do we apply the silk layer?

If it's all you have. Or you could build two sided. It's a tiny amount of copper. Also might provide more shielding or other purpose

But then you lose the ground plane.