The RF design or test engineer can select a tuning rod, which has attached to it a Syfer High-Q capacitor, from a range of capacitance values, (from 0.1pF to 100pF). Typically, an RF engineer might need to “fine tune” a circuit such that he adds or removes capacitance from his circuit by substitution, or by the use of a variable capacitor (trimmer). This is not always practical for a number of reasons, specifically the effort of soldering and de-soldering devices.
Through trial and error, using tuning rods with a range of different capacitor values around the nominal value, a single Syfer surface mount capacitor of the optimum value can be determined and eventually installed in the application. One of the easiest ways to check what the optimum value should be is to place another capacitor on top of the existing printed circuit board mounted device, effectively running them in parallel, at the combined capacitance value. This is most efficiently achieved today by means of the Syfer tuning rod kits. The short probe connections on each side of the chip termination make a solid connection by firm pressure applied by hand.
Syfer’s Hi-Q capacitor range is available in a variety of case sizes, with exceptionally Hi-Q and low-ESR, designed specifically for high frequency applications, including tuners, resonators, filters, oscillators, RF power amplifiers and tuning networks.