The AM Forum

Hello:

While doing some work in the eprint arXiv I stumbled over this paper explaining the Smith Chart.

It is written by F Caspers at CERN and is probably intended for RF people working with particle accelerators, but generally speaking when it comes to RF, it is still all about feedlines and loads.   

The Smith Chart is another one of those things in radio that has always been mysterious to me so I am always interested in anything that might be readable and help me understand it.   The abstract and links for downloading the paper are here:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.4068

73

Rob

p.s. For those unfamiliar with the arXiv, the X in arXiv is supposed to be the Greek letter Chi (X) so the arXiv is pronounced "archive."

There's a downloadable animated Smith chart tutorial somewhere online.  I'll try to see if I can find it and post it.

Yes Don, I believe this is one, Alan

http://www.home.agilent.com/upload/cmc_upload/All/Smith_Chart.htm?cmpid=zzfindnw_smithchart&cc=US&lc=eng

There are a number of free SC tools also available that are quite good.

Great stuff, y'all. Thanks for posting it. With a bit of study, I may finally be able to master the darn thing  :)

Here it is. Choose any one of 5 tutorials on the Smith chart. Plus many others: choose from the menu at the left of the page.

http://www.fourier-series.com/rf-concepts/smithchart.html

There is a very useful (free) utility from AC6LA called TLDetails. 

http://www.ac6la.com/tldetails.html (http://www.ac6la.com/tldetails.html)

It enables you to see the affect of easily varying transmission line characteristics, frequency, length, etc and display the results on a Smith chart.  I use it all the time as a teaching aid when explaining Z transformation to people as well as a handy design and analysis tool.

This and a reasonable explanation of the chart's circles goes a long way to making it understandable. 

Here you can find my software... for Smith Charts.

http://laacg1.lanl.gov/laacg/c-on-line/sheets/rfmatch.html

Old but good.

Giorgio