The Case of the Smashed Schottkys - RF Cafe Forums

RF Cafe Forums closed its virtual doors in late 2012 mainly due to other social media platforms dominating public commenting venues. RF Cafe Forums began sometime around August of 2003 and was quite well-attended for many years. By 2012, Facebook and Twitter were overwhelmingly dominating online personal interaction, and RF Cafe Forums activity dropped off precipitously. Regardless, there are still lots of great posts in the archive that ware worth looking at. Below are the old forum threads, including responses to the original posts. Here is the full original RF Cafe Forums on Archive.org

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 Post subject: The Case of the Smashed Schottkys
Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2010 10:48 am 
 
Site Admin
 

Joined: Sun Aug 03, 2003 2:02 pm
Posts: 878
Location: Erie, PA
Greetings:

For some reason I happened to think of a humorous event from back in 1989 when I was working for General Electric Aerospace Division, in Utica, NY. It was not quite so funny at the time.

I was assigned to design the front end for a multi-channel L-band airborne electronic warfare receiver. This being my first job after having recently graduated with my BSEE, I was scrambling trying to come up to speed on all the new terms and formulas for receivers with their attendant filters, amplifiers, limiters, couplers, switches, etc. An experienced engineer from another GE division lent some expertise on building a simple power level detector for the ALC circuit, using a couple Schottky diodes. The schedule was getting a bit tight, so he volunteered to part with a handful from his own stash and put half a dozen of them in the mail for me.

Well, a few days later the much-anticipated diodes arrived in the mail... in a standard business envelope... with no padding. They were all pulverized into sand-like particles, with the readily identifiable black diode specs and gold bond wires mixed in.

He was genuinely surprised when I call to tell him of the damaged diodes.

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- Kirt Blattenberger 
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Posted  11/12/2012/span>