I finally finished the active probe project!

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MN785

I finally finished the active probe project!

#408583

Post by MN785 »

I finally made an active probe so I can poke around inside radios without my old 10x probe loading down the circuits (especially the SSB frequency alignment on the DX2547 :angry-banghead: ). I tried this once before and it didn't work well, but now that I have dry film and can make decent PCB traces, it worked great! The probe is based on the poor man's active probe schematic by David Jewsbury, except I added an amplifier after the fet so it has a unity gain. I also added a low pass filter because I don't intend to use this for anything but CB radios, but the board picture was taken before that was added back when I had the filter spot by the SMA connector jumpered. I stuffed it into a chunk of copper tubing with caps and sealed it with foil tape. The tip is capacitively coupled to the FET using the board as a capacitor and the input capacitance is about 1pF :)
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