On Wed, 17 Nov 2004 11:27:07 -0500, Pete Smith wrote:
>Wouldn't the bypass capacitor to ground take care of pin 1 problems by
>making a good chassis connection at RF?
A bypass cap on the signal conductor to the chassis does not help a pin 1
problem. A
bypass cap from the shield to the chassis may help, hurt, or not be enough. It
would help
by lowering the Z of the path to the chassis, but the circuit board is still
seeing the IZ
drop across the cap (which may have some inductance of its own). It could hurt
if the
cap forms a parallel resonance with the L of the path via the circuit board.
The best fix is
to connect the shield (or signal conductor) properly to the chassis/enclosure.
>I was just using ZIP cord for the speaker leads.
Replacing ZIP cord (even expensive ZIP cord) with twisted pair will kill a lot
of RF
problems on loudspeaker lines.
>Again, if this is low-speed data or DC, mightn't bypassing
>both sides to a single chassis ground help?
Yes, with the limitations noted above. Certainly a suitable bypass helps if
the cause of
the problem is insufficient filtering (bypassing). It all depends on what
mechanisms are
at play. And there can be more than one mechanism -- you stomp down on one of
them
and the other is still there. :) The old "two-problem" problem.
For a tutorial discussion of this (which I had a lot to do with writing) see
the informative
annex to the draft AES48, currently out for comment. http://www.aes.org, go to
Standards for Comment. It's a free download. While the illustrations are for
balanced
wiring, the physics (and the draft Standard) apply equally to unbalanced
wiring.
Jim Brown K9YC
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