ATF54143 Preamplifiers Articles Removing
24. December 2002.
I decided to remove ATF54143 preamp articles because some
measurement
on built amplifiers didn't confirmed predicted performances.
In this very moment nobody knows what
reason for these big discrepancies is
(NF is higher about 1.5dB) because all professional programs
for calculations
and simulations ( Ansoft Serenade v8.71, Agilent ADS2001 and
Eagleware
Genesys v8.01) agree that everything is OK, but in practice
something
is wrong!
I am suspicious that transistors are not uniform and from
one to
another specimen differs very much. But I
am not sure, of course!
Until that we found what is problem, I decided to remove
article from my
site.
SRI.
Strongly
recommended modification
19. January 2003.
Hi OMs,
Finally we discovered (thanks to S53WW and other S5 guys) problem of higher
than expected NF of YU1AW ATF54143 preamps.
The problem was in poor quality of 22uH RFC in gate bias!
This RFC, on such high frequencies, serves as poor quality capacitor and
produces much higher preamp NF than expected!
Cure is very simple. Instead of mentioned RFC should be used air coil with
first parallel resonance near working frequency of preamp.
Added coil must be orientated at right angle to printed circuit coil in
drain line to minimize parasitic input-output coupling effects and
possible oscillations!
Modification:
1. Remove resistor of 5.6 ohms (33 ohms in 2m preamps),
capacitor of 0.5 pF and 22uH choke in gate bias line.
2. Replace them with series connected coil RFC and resistor R as follows:
RFC coil data:
1296 MHz:
coil inner diameter D=3mm
coil length l=2mm
turns number n=6 turns (close wounded)
wire diameter dw=0.3-0.35mm enameled
resistor in series with coil R=56 ohms
432 MHz:
D=5 mm
l=3.5 mm
n=11 turns (close wounded)
dw=0.3 mm
R=56 ohms
144 MHz:
D=6 mm
l=6 mm
n=30 zav. (close wounded)
dw=0.2 mm
R=56 ohms
After this, strongly recommended, modification measured NF were very
close to predicted!
Gain and IP3 were almost exactly as predicted!
NF and Gain measurements:
(the best results)
144MHz: NF=0.4dB, Gain=26dB (measured by YU1AW)
144MHz: NF=0.37dB, Gain=20.8dB (measured by OK1UOW)
432MHz: NF=0.38dB, Gain 22dB, P1dB=18dBm (measured by S53WW)
1296MHz: NF=0.4dB, Gain=17.7dB (measured by S53WW)
73, Dragan YU1AW