I've just had bad experiences with telling someone how to do stuff and they buy the cheap stuff and get mad at me when it burns up.

as long as you understand what it will and won't do. also talking about small parts. I work with resistors that are 0402 (40 mils by 20 mils) and have worked with 01005 resistors (10 mils by 5 mils) those are really fun to solder. also, depending on how much of this you plan to do. you may want to get a hot air gun. atten is a hakko knock off and you can usually get them from ebay for about $150. if you only do it a little then just use a hotplate.

good luck man.

If we're going to talk about that crazy surface mount reflow soldering stuff with those tiny components, I might as well provide these links...
https://www.hackaday.com/2008/02/16/t...ow-controller/
https://www.hackaday.com/2008/01/08/g...unt-soldering/
https://www.hackaday.com/2006/11/03/s...reflow-how-to/
https://www.hackaday.com/2008/08/05/h...ring-station/2

Be sure to look at the comments, often user comments there have great info.

these are the ones we have at work. we have gotten the attens because of the price. the hakkos run about 850-900 new where as the attens run around 150

https://cgi.ebay.com/HAKKO-850-SMD-So...ayphotohosting

I would post on here the inside of the parts that we design but I might get fired. most of our parts (not packages) are less than a milimeter long and are less than half a milimeter wide and the thickness is measured in microns.

found a project that was dead so I feel pretty good about sharing it. no details though. it is 2mm square.

Check this out.

I would start reading around page 44.

The EFIE schematics you need and the parts list is included

https://www.free-energy-info.co.uk/Chapter10.pdf

BEEF that's awesome. I wish I was in a different line of work.

well you take the good with the bad. I work with state of the art equipment. $60k network analyzers that go up to 20 gigahertz but there is quite a bit of stress in my job, deadlines and of course projects that work great but nobody wants them. that is what the picture is. high band 4.9-5.85GHz PA that will do about 16 dBm out and pulls aroun 160mA at power. works great. sorry for the technical mumbo jumbo.

an engineering degree is only 4 years and you can be a tech for 2. a great field to get into.

Yeah, I went with CompSci cause I'm lazy. I used to love since and math but for some reason I couldn't stay awake in Differential Equations and didn't like all the slow documenting and experimental methods, I just wanted to flesh out a theory, prove it and use it.

I am actually a tech up there but have been approached several times about going back for my engineering degree. I work with an engineer and actually design the boards that these parts are evaluated with. If I had less going on in my life, I would jump on the opportunity to go back to school but you know how life goes.

I started my career at ericsson working on their base station modules. the units that go in the towers. I then got into industrial electronics. good old 480 three phase. I am finally back into the communications side. I am actually working on the non-cellular side. I work with wireless lan and wimax. we are basically making amplifiers for laptops and other hand held devices. when I say amplifiers that may be misleading. most of our parts are around 3mm square and about a half mm tall. they are considered power amplifiers even though they only output around 16-18dBm which is a very low signal.

a few claims to fame. we have an amplifier in the gameboy DS, PSP, and NIKON has a camera that will send your pictures to an online storage bank if you get near a wifi hotspot. that is one that the guy I am working with worked on directly (the amplifier that is).

RFMD.com check them out. their are career opportunities and they have several sites. I work in Greensboro NC which is where their headquarters is and where the company started.

*edit* I meant to say this earlier. that part in the pic was taken with my camera phone. the reason their is a circle around it is because it was taken through a microscope and the part is 2mm square (8 pin package). I think the die is 1.2mm square if memory serves me correctly. also the part is open faced which means that the finished product would be black with the part number on the top so everything you see in the pic would be encapsulated and not visible. you would see the pads on the bottom footprint.

dkjones 96

Have you hooked up the EFIE yet? If you have what were the results?