Creative Antenna Experiments Series: Building PCBs and Homebrew CNC

Our mission at ClearSkyRF is to provide a low-threshold experimental environment that unleashes new forms of creativity and scientific insight.

Using what’s at hand and making the most of your surroundings is critical to gaining quick insights without the high price tag associated with formal experimentation.

In this series, I share documentation from my past experiments — hopefully to spark ideas and conversations.

I like to design and build my own PCBs, sometimes as artisanal as possible. Here I am drilling one on a homebrew CNC made from wood and drawer slides (it’s handy, even if it’s not for surviving a zombie apocalypse):

The toner transfer method is time-honored, fast, and reliable.

This clip shows how I generally do it:

This is one of my “standard RF experimenter’s designs:

Sometimes I have my designs fabricated, of course. Especially above a couple of GHz:

SSOP-focused for playing with PLL chips:

Of course, not everything needs a PCB. I’ve made plenty of things on protoboards. Here’s a remote HF antenna switch for selecting beverages:

Here’s a DTMF decoder for a transcontinental remote access project (it worked flawlessly):