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Topband: Ferrite Common Mode Chokes

To: topband@contesting.com
Subject: Topband: Ferrite Common Mode Chokes
From: Jim Brown <jim@audiosystemsgroup.com>
Reply-to: jim@audiosystemsgroup.com
Date: Wed, 22 May 2013 07:22:29 -0700
List-post: <topband@contesting.com">mailto:topband@contesting.com>
On 5/21/2013 9:42 AM, Tom W8JI wrote:
31 materials has a Q of about 1 on 80 meters. This means a good part of the impedance is resistive.

Not quite.. A strong resistive component is present only around resonance, and the resonance of a single pass through a #31 or #43 core is in the range of 150 - 300 MHz, depending on the dimensions of the core. This is clearly shown by Fair-Rite data sheets. While there is some resistance at HF, it is small compared to the inductive component until the inductance is resonated lower by the stray capacitance of multiple turns.

To get effective choking impedance from these materials at HF, the resonance must be moved down to the HF spectrum by winding multiple turns through the core. Those multi-turn chokes _do_ show a low Q resonance (on the order of 0.5 for #31, a bit higher for #43) in the HF range. Both the inductance and the resistance coupled from the core are multiplied by the square of the turns, making the choking impedance much higher. The stray capacitance of the winding increases linearly with the number of turns, also helping move the resonance down.

The only material I know of whose resistive component strongly dominates at HF is the #73 material chosen by W2DU for his chokes, but they are only made to fit rather small coax. It takes a very large number of these beads (at least several hundred) to achieve enough choking impedance to handle the high common mode voltages encountered in many antenna systems at high power. Most so-called W2DU "current baluns" are made with far fewer beads, and many don't even use the #73 mix.

73, Jim K9YC
All good topband ops know how to put up a beverage at night.
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