RF Circuits

This is a RF power amplifier design using 2SC2782 bipolar transistors in a tuned class C circuit. The amplifier can be driven to full power with less than 1 watt driving power, so that a large gain margin results in this FM transmitter.

To obtain stability in this rf amplifier, I employed several techniques, such as placing the resonances of base and collector chokes far apart, damping the chokes with resistors, using RC combinations for absorption of unwanted frequencies, using feedtrough capacitors for bypassing on the board, etc. It took some tweaking, but the amplifier ended up unconditionally stable.


RF Amplifier Low-pass filter
This amplifier has a low-pass filter at the output, resulting in a signal clean enough to be directly connected to an antenna. The SWR meter was placed before the filter, in order to clean out the harmonics produced by its diodes. In any case, while the signal is clean enough to easily satisfy usual legal and technical requirements, this transmitter should not be used at a multi-transmitter site without further narrow band filtering!


This is so because any other strong signals on nearby frequencies would be picked up by the antenna and coupled to the power transistor, which would mix it up with the own signal, creating a wide array of intermodulation products, some of which would be re-radiated! This is a common and very big problem in many multi transmitter sites. In such places, not even one FM transmitter should be allowed on the air without narrow band filtering! Such filtering is easily accomplished by means of a single tuned cavity, which can be constructed from copper tubing or sheet.

RF Amplifier PCB


Here is the PCB layout, including the microstrips. The board is 20cm long and is double-sided, with the backside being a continuous groundplane except for two small pads at the driver transistor base and collector. I cut out these pads with a knife, rather than making a whole computer drawing for that!

Source: RF Power Amplifier 80W 2SC2782