The Modern RF Engineer and the Ohmic Oracle

Once upon a sunny Saturday, our hero—the modern RF engineer, clad in Crocs, cargo shorts, and misplaced confidence—approached his newly installed antenna with the swagger of someone who just discovered Ohm’s law on TikTok.

Armed with the deadliest weapon in his RF arsenal—a  4.99€ digital multimeter from the bargain bin—he squints at the two shiny PL connectors. “Time to measure the impedance,” he mumbles, unaware that Maxwell is crying somewhere in the electromagnetic afterlife.

With the precision of a neurosurgeon and the understanding of a potato, he carefully places the probes on the coax. The screen flashes "0.3 Ω" and he exclaims, “Perfect! A perfect match! This antenna is resonant!”

He double-checks his work by yelling into the coax. When the antenna doesn't answer back, he assumes it’s because he forgot to bless it with a dab of dielectric grease.

Unbeknownst to him, somewhere across the band, a ham hears the ghost of his signal—a 73 dB-over-9 fart of RF distortion, modulated by doubt and coupled by cluelessness.

Back at the shack, he proudly updates his forum signature to his new vanity call:

“Antenna tuned to perfection (measured 0.0 ohms) — 73 de KN0WITALL”

His next project? Using a food thermometer to measure SWR. Stay tuned.

 

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Written by Joeri Van Dooren, ON6URE – RF, electronics and software engineer, complex platform and antenna designer. Founder of RF.Guru. An expert in active and passive antennas, high-power RF transformers, and custom RF solutions, he has also engineered telecom and broadcast hardware, including set-top boxes, transcoders, and E1/T1 switchboards. His expertise spans high-power RF, embedded systems, digital signal processing, and complex software platforms, driving innovation in both amateur and professional communications industries.