Many Astron power supply schematics

[nukie]

Hello I found this on the interweb thought it might be useful for someone learning about Power Supply design.

http://www.repeater-builder.com/astron/astron-index.html , scroll down a few page you will find lots of schematics.

[vk6zgo]

Yeah, I have been trying to make two points on this forum for a while:-

(1)The Amateur Radio Websites are a good resource for Engineers & Techs,whether they are "Hams" or not.

(2)The best way to learn about various types of circuitry is to see how other people have used the stuff you learned at Uni/Tech School!
It isn't really "copying",it's commonsense,as most common circuitry is public domain,anyway!

If you think you have a "new & innovative" way of doing something,you may find it has been tried & has not performed as well as traditional methods.
Of course,new components may have been developed which make a previously poor circuit a winner.
Even if your method is truly innovative,it may not perform as well as the other techniques in use.

VK6ZGO   

[NiHaoMike]

Even designs that normally perform poorer than existing designs can excel in special cases. A good example is using LEDs to drop voltage. The voltage drop varies a good amount and the current limit is small, but if that's fine, it works nicely. And it doubles as a power on indicator.

If you have access to it, IEEE is a great source of ideas. You'll easily come across many designs that need careful thinking to understand how they work.

Of course,new components may have been developed which make a previously poor circuit a winner.

There are too many examples of that. The switched reluctance motor was invented over 100 years ago, but poor performance caused it to fall into obscurity. Today, however, the world's most efficient air conditioner (as far as I'm aware) uses a switched reluctance motor driving a centrifugal compressor to allow the use of water as a refrigerant. That in itself is another example - water's very low vapor pressure needs a very high (vapor) flow rate to get a reasonable capacity and valve losses are too significant at those pressures. The switched reluctance motor allowed the development of very high speed centrifugal compressors that get a high flow rate in a small size and the lack of valves means no valve losses.

[TELCO]

I am a ham radio operator since 1997 and the most important stuff I have learned in electronics and RF communications I have done through this hobby and experimentation in it. I am truly thankful. 

[David Hess]

Even designs that normally perform poorer than existing designs can excel in special cases. A good example is using LEDs to drop voltage. The voltage drop varies a good amount and the current limit is small, but if that's fine, it works nicely. And it doubles as a power on indicator.

Sometimes these imperfections can be used advantageously.  An LED's forward voltage drop versus temperature can be used to compensate for the Vbe voltage drop versus temperature in bias circuits.