Soldering – Week of 03/09/2015

The Fifth Week

The primary goal of my SRP thus far has been to create a device that shows the applications origami can have to engineering. However, the secondary goal of my SRP was to explore the field of electrical engineering, and that is exactly what I did during my fifth week. With the help of the grad students in the lab I am working in (shout-out to Ian!), I learned how to solder and managed to solder a Planar Inverted–F (PIFA) antenna together. Here is a picture of the final antenna:

Here is a picture of the soldering iron and its holder:

When soldering, it is critical to “tin” the soldering iron with solder (a metal alloy) before placing the iron back into its holder. Iron can easily oxidize (also known as rusting) when exposed to air, and the extremely high temperature of the soldering iron only speeds up this process. By leaving some melted solder on the soldering iron before putting it back into its holder (“tinning”), the iron is protected from oxidizing. Unfortunately, someone who used the soldering iron before me forgot to do this, and now the soldering iron has a “dead” side. This meant that whenever I was trying to put some solder onto my antenna, I would have to rotate the soldering iron until I found the side that actually worked. Though this made the task more difficult, with some help I finally managed to make my antenna.

Though the way antennas work and what makes a PIFA antenna different is a bit beyond me, I was able to test the frequencies at which my antenna worked best using a network analyzer. With the help of Ian, one of the grad students in the lab I am working in, I was able to calibrate the network analyzer, connect my antenna to it, and then test the frequencies my antenna resonated at. Here is a picture of the network analyzer and the outputs I got:

According to the network analyzer, my antenna works best at 1.23GHz and 2.89GHz. That's all I have for now - until next time!

-Parthib Samadder