SMDK - 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

-- Amateur Radio

-- Anecdotes, Gripes, & Humor

-- Antennas

-- CAE, CAD, & Software

-- Circuits & Components

-- Employment & Interviews

-- Miscellany

-- Swap Shop

-- Systems

-- Test & Measurement

-- Webmaster

Guest

Post subject: SMDK

Unread post Posted: Mon Feb 07, 2005 2:31 pm

Hello,

I am new to RF design and it is not really my field. So please execuse me and neglect the question if it is too naive for this forum.

My interest is in prototyping a small receiver test bed to obtain a practical evaluation of some algorithms and architectures.

My question to you is about the commercialy available Surface Mount Developement kits (SMDKs). I read about them and they seem to support rapid prototyping of RF circuits. How are these kits as an alternative to designing PCBs (since I am only interested in test bed evaluation not product design)? Are there any issues (like impedence matching) that become important when these kits are used for prototyping? In summary, for my case, is it a smart option to go in for the SMDK rather than designing a PCB?

Posted  11/12/2012