The termination insensitive amplifier described by W7ZOI & K3NHI is a useful building block for the RF home constructor. I've been making these using copper pads glued on to copper boards but wondered if there were PCB designs available. I know about the Mostly DIY RF boards and kits but as the boards are out of stock I thought I've see if I could get boards made myself.
I found Craig Weston, VE3CBW, has kindly drawn up a design in KiCAD and shared it publicly. It opens up just fine in KiCad. He has a blog post here.
Craig has done a wonderful job of laying out the board in a logical way.
To get a board made I chose PCBWay, who I've used in the past. I followed their instructions on exporting the Gerber files. There are layers for the copper, hole drilling, solder mask and text - a bit daunting but I just did what they said and as you can see it worked just fine:
I've now populated the board and it works nicely.
The instructions on exporting the required files from KiCad are for an older version but I muddled through and made a zip of all the output files which was uploaded to PCBWay. I can see that they make a plugin for KiCad that does it all and I plan to try that next time. Here's what I zipped and sent. Not sure if everything is required but there were no complaints.
My thanks to Craig. I would like to comment on his blog but it requires a login to something and I haven't figured out how to get through that so if you read this - thanks! Craig has a fascinating blog and a YouTube channel.
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