AB6WP Technical craft of electronics
Making radio gear
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According to legend, in the 1700's, some guy named Ben, flew a kite into an incoming storm front. He managed to tie a very thin wire along the kite's high end. He then attached the near end of this wire to the inside of a glass jar. This jar was coated with a metal residue inside. Theory says the outside of the jar also has to be coated, but not connected to the inside.
After a while, and before lightning struck, he brought the kite down, took the jar to his shack and demostrated that the jar had electricity stored in it.
Ben was not the first to use this new technology. It had been discovered precisely in Leyden (Netherlands) a few years before. He demonstrated that electricity could be obtained from the clouds.
As time passed, Leyden Jars were refined and called "condensers". We now call them "capacitors". Without these, radios, TV's, computers, and most of today's (2020) electronics would not be the same.
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I'm a very far cry from Ben, but I'd like to handcraft some of the things that did not exist two or three hundred years ago, so please see below my happy journey through amateur radio gear:
How to make air variable capacitors
How to make a roller inductor
How to make an antenna tuner with SWR meter
How to keep it lightweight and fun
How to make an SWR meter using a Tandem Match (Stockton Bridge) directional coupler
Upgrading a tapped inductor tuner with a roller inductor