Universal Aluminium Enclosure for RF Circuits

Every RF engineer faces the challenge of getting the PCB into an enclosure without compromising RF performance. An enclosure that lets you easily switch PCBs not only makes life easier, but significantly improves the prototyping process. That is, in a nutshell, what the Gquipment RF-MINI-Enclosure was designed for.

Enclosure Design Parameters

To achieve our goals with the RF MINI, several key design decisions had to be made:

Dimensions- The dimensions of the enclosure were chosen in order to support a PCB size of 26.6 mm x 26.6 mm. This matches well with typical, relatively small-sized RF module applications. While it offers enough real estate for those designs that use more components.

Easy interchange of PCB's- The enclosure uses a bottom- and top- cover that is attached to the enclosure body with screws. Making it easy to open.. What's more, the SMA connectors can be removed too. This makes PCB interchanges very straight forward. The enclosure is therefore very handy in the prototyping phase of your project and / or as a testbed for PCBs.

Application flexibility- The enclosure is equipped with mounting holes for up to three SMA ports, a ground terminal, and feed through capacitor for applying power. When not in use, the holes can be covered or filled up with dummy screws.

PCB mounting- The PCBs are mounted at the aluminium body of the enclosure and can be fastened with up to 8 screws. This way, a good low resistance path from PCB to enclosure and SMA ports is guaranteed.

SMA ports- The enclosure uses straight, flanged SMA connectors that fit exactly into the enclosures hole, with its teflon isolator travelling through the aluminium enclosure wall. This way, the coaxial configuration is maintained up to the terminating connector pin. Which lands on the PCB directly. This design keeps VSWR at a minimum. There are three SMA connector types that can be used: a 6 GHz connector for less demanding applications, a 12.4 GHz version and a stainless version which is rated for 18 GHz.

Milled aluminium- The body of the enclosure is solid milled aluminium. This eliminates joints and is a great heat conductor too. Which can be beneficial when heat generated by your design is transferred to the enclosure's surrounding.

Applications

The enclosure can be used for several kinds of application:

- Amplifiers

- Couplers, splitters and combiners

- Frequency multipliers

- VCO's

- Bias-Tee

- Prototyping, testing of RF PCBs

- Small production batches

Versions

The MINI enclosure comes in two flavours:

- The RF-ENCL-MINI-YF-01, enclosure with mounting flange

- The RF-ENCL-MINI-NF-01,without a mounting flange

Datasheet

- Gquipment RF-ENCL-MINI-R01-XX