wrote in news:1109527218.137133.13160
@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com:


Alun L. Palmer wrote:
wrote in news:1109446458.805271.244940
@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:




It's much easier to use a Smith chart than to do the calculations

You don't need a Smith chart and you don't have to do the
calculations either.

http://www.circuitsage.com/matching.html

w3rv


I still have a pad of Smith charts. I don't have Mathcad. I have the
same attitude to this as I do to Morse, i.e. to each his own. I don't
see anything wrong in having test questions on either subject, as I
think

people should know about them, I just don't think that there should be
a test on copying code by ear.

. . "Test questions on Morse"? . . "People should know about Morse"?
How many WPM izzat??


Zero

You obviously didn't spend much time cruising the link I posted. You
don't have to have Mathcad to solve transmission line problems to get
away from the primitive paper and pencil nonsense. There are freely
available Excel and Java routines which will do the job too.

Mathcad . . ah, yes . . If you do any engineering math which gets
complicated in Excel you need Mathcad Alun. I've been using it for
about ten years and it's become absolutely indispensible. Maybe only a
half hour after I first loaded and fired Mathcad up those ten years
ago and started messing with it I was running rapid-fire "what-if's" on
a double integral I'd dreamed up as an exercise. Very intuitive.
Otherwise I wouldn't be able to run it. Heh.

'Tis an incredible solver which has saved me hundreds of hours of grunt
number crunching (and curve plotting BS) labor both on and off the job.
Don't believe the prices for it you see floating around the Web. My
latest iteration is v.2000 Pro ($800) which I bought in a
shrink-wrapped package for $65 at a local computer show after it was
one version outdated.

w3rv



You're right, I didn't notice that there was a Java routine and an Excel
spreadsheet.

I'm a patent agent these days. I may write patent applications for
communications systems that have complex equations in them, but that's
about as close as I get to having to solve mathematical problems, except in
the hobby of course.

Smith charts are actually most useful for designing stubs. I suppose I
could design a stub match for a beam using a Smith chart if I felt so
inclined, I know how to do it, but 9/10 of hams only follow someone else's
published designs, or they might adjust the stub or other matching circuit
by trial and error.

For this reason I'm actually not sure of the value of testing hams on Smith
charts, but I felt pretty sure I had seen a question on them in the pool?