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Diodes inline with antenna?

nfsus

Yeah its turned off, touch it
May 9, 2011
501
258
73
47
Arkansas
Playing around I put two diodes inline with my antenna before the receiver. Attenuated the signal. But seemed like it did better than the rf gain with the signal to noise ratio. Is it? Or did I just imagine that it did? Or is it just an atrenuator?
 

RF is AC current at a spec'd frequency and power level. Adding a diode in-series will rectify that AC, turning it into DC. What you'll hear on the RX end would sound more like a machine gun, rather than anything intelligible.
But diodes ARE essential and used to isolate the signal for sampling it.
 
RF is AC current at a spec'd frequency and power level. Adding a diode in-series will rectify that AC, turning it into DC. What you'll hear on the RX end would sound more like a machine gun, rather than anything intelligible.
But diodes ARE essential and used to isolate the signal for sampling it.
No machine gun sound here. But it's between the rx antenna and the receiver.
 
Unless you had a situation of severe receiver overload, such as somebody parked in your driveway transmitting, these diodes would never have enough RF voltage across them to even begin to conduct or rectify in the recieve mode. They do have some internal capacitance so they are acting as nothing more than attenuators in this application. The reason the direction doesn't matter is because capacitance doesn't change with the direction of the diode.
 

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