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Base station PCBs have arrived – time to solder!

Well, the boards actually arrived several weeks ago, but I’ve only just got round to doing the soldering.  As ever, I’ve ordered all my components from Farnell in the UK.

All of the passive components I’ve used are 0402 sized (0.5mm by 1.0mm).  The advantage of components this small is that you can squeeze a lot into the RF sections of the board, most notably at the output of the CC1125.  This decreases board size and improves the RF performance.  You can go much smaller than 0402 – 0201 is the next size down, followed by 01005 – only 0.2mm by 0.4mm!  Getting decent performance out of an inductor or capacitor that small will be difficult, so it’s a tradeoff between size and performance.

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