Came across this stash the other day, nicely piled up to be scrapped, unfortunately. Was told: grab what you want before it goes .. 😳🤷🏼‍♂️🤯

RF absorber pyramidal panels like these are expensive and really hard to get at as a private person, so it felt like I struck gold 😃

I filled my little car and tomorrow I’ll be back for more: hear-say travels fast in the RF engineering community and as these are located within a secured area with strict access control, I was asked to bring some of it outside the fence 😂

#rfengineering #antennaengineer #antennadesign #hamradio #hamr #antennameasurement

Follow-up, I found a beautiful WR-137 flange, tell me, why the hell are waveguide components always either overpriced, beat to sh.t or a combo of the two?!? 🤷🏼‍♂️🤷🏼‍♂️🙂

Well I got lucky (at a cost) and now I have an operational horn with a decent passband between 5.25-8.1GHz 😃👌🏻

I was a bit surprised to find I needed the absorbers but a quick calculation confirmed that anything non-absorbent the first couple of meters will affect S11.

I included a SWR plot as well: it’s always amuses me to see how violent everything collapses once the (half)wavelength exceeds the physical dimensions of the waveguide, approaching the cut-off frequency. Suddenly, all you have is a useless piece of metal 🤷🏼‍♂️😂

I plan to do some free range (outdoor) measurements once this winter clears, stay tuned 🙂

#hamradio #hamr #rfengineering #antennas #electronics #antennaengineer