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Cubdriver:

--- Quote from: rdl on May 11, 2017, 04:18:12 am ---
--- Quote from: Muxr on May 11, 2017, 02:36:13 am ---Interesting to see wavy matched traces. I guess for RF it makes sense.

--- End quote ---

These may date back to when boards were basically drawn by hand and tape was used to lay down traces.

--- End quote ---

I doubt they're that old - I'm pretty sure that tape was out before SMD was in.  A lot of my old 60s era HP gear has what appear to be tape and vellum art boards, but I think that method (at least commercially) had gone the way of the dinosaur before surface mount stuff became mainstream.

Here's a link to a pic of an old 'tape' board: https://pmanning.smugmug.com/Electronics/HP-3440A-DVM/i-hXGjLNQ/A

-Pat

OP, cool photos!  It's always neat to see closeups of this sort of thing.

-Pat
TerraHertz:
I love TV tuners too. Beautiful RF wizardry!
OP's photos made me finally look up what MELF means. I knew they are called that, but not what it stands for.
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_electrode_leadless_face
Miyuki:
Old tuners are lovely, even better in pre IC era
All these nice tiny colorful coils poured in wax

//edit:
like this one with lot of manually tuned coils, must be insane job to poke coils all day  :o
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Tuner2001.jpg
CJay:
They're all pretty modern, but SMD has been around for a *long* time, it was definitely around when I was repairing tellies as a 17 year old and I'm 49 this year.

The really pretty ones had nary an IC in sight, there's a schematic of one of the (later) ones I used to repair here:

http://www.philipstv.org.uk/blog/early-philips-colour-tv/g8/g8-electronics/

and there were plenty of others earlier than that, some with valves/tubes, some with germanium transistors working up around 900MHz, others were Machiavelliean works of mechanical torture...

Gyro:

--- Quote ---and there were plenty of others earlier than that, some with valves/tubes, some with germanium transistors working up around 900MHz, others were Machiavelliean works of mechanical torture...
--- End quote ---

Haha, yes those were fun to play with. I remember there was a mod to turn the transistor ones into UHF TV sound converters, by modding the LO to bring the IF up into the FM broadcast band - one of the shops on the Edgeware Road sold modified ones. It was mono of course, but a lot better quality than you could get by tapping into the back of the TV (particularly live chassis ones!). I had lots of fun tweaking the coupling strips and end vanes of the multi-gang tuning cap, that ran the length of the tuner between the individual tuned cavities, to try to get best selectivity. I think I gave up after the third tuner and left it as was.


Edit: Just the right amount of black magic for a mass produced device....  :)

http://hackaday.com/2016/07/11/not-quite-101-uses-for-an-analog-uhf-tv-tuner/
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