Electronics Projects of Tom Ahola

Here is a gallery of a small fraction of my many electronics projects during the past years. All are my own designs. My main interest has always been in designing, not building gadgets. Click on the pictures to enlarge them. Some are old pictures of low quality. Unfortunately there are no records of my earliest designs that I made at around 11-12 years of age.

As a kid I started with simple battery-switch-lightbulb circuits. But soon I started experimenting with transistors and electron tubes. Printed circuit boards I learned to make at age 14. I had built a simple oscilloscope from an old black & white television. The large screen was impressive but the speed and accuracy of magnetic deflection was inadequate. When I turned 16 I had saved enough money for a real oscilloscope. I still use this 60MHz 2-channel analog oscilloscope every now and then, but nowadays I have a modern computer controlled electronic measurement environment. One of my special skills is in Test & Measurement system development. My system consists of a multitude of instruments such as power supplies, multimeters, signal generators, RF network analyzer, RF power meter, digital oscilloscope and frequency counter. I have made test software that can quickly do various sweep measurements, controlling simultaneously several of my instruments and doing measurements and plotting results.

I also build Radio Equipment and Antennas. See my Amateur Radio page: OH2FRM. There are only a few antenna pictures there under my location. I might add more in the future.

Do check my CV. I'm always open for new challenges and projects.

I have made some online tools available, useful for electronics design

• XTRON Electronics Expert System (including RF and antenna calculators)
• Tom's calculators

These boards are from the 1980's when I did use a decon-dalo ink pen to draw the resist on the board by hand. I was a young kid then. My very first boards from the beginning of the 80's I don't have any pictures of. My first boards I etched using the very dangerous Nitric Acid HNO3, which emits poisoneaus fumes and can be used to make explosives. These days kids would not very easily get access to that kind of chemicals. Later I used Ferric Chloride FeCl3, which is less dangerous. In the 1990's I started using photoresists to make more accurate boards with higher density.