Ground

Uh, in fact, I remember the first person I heard on SSB.

He was on top band then, but, uh, he was an, a, a local amateur, and, uh, we all on- wondered, "How, how on earth did you copy that?" 'Cause there was no...

Well, we did have BFOs and it took...

We w- got, we got to learn how to tune to the s- radio with the, with the BFO on.

End-

End fed.

Just a single, single wire to it, and, uh, the other half of the AT, the other end of the ATU went to earth.

Yeah.

Because the strand doesn't disappear when you leave it out.

It sits there in the plug body, and it can bridge two terminals, live and neutral, live and earth.

A strand of copper is a perfectly good conductor.

It's copper.

The answer, and it's the answer Daniel probably suspects, is that you don't cut all three cores to the same length.

You cut them to different lengths.

earth longest, live shortest.

Because earth has the furthest to travel inside the plug, live has the shortest and neutral sits in the middle.

The book is very specific about this.

To establish a true Earth ground, you need a solid copper pole at least eight feet long and about half an inch in diameter.

Whoa.

And you have to take a heavy sledgehammer and violently drive that eight-foot pole straight down deep into the Earth.

So a lot of users, they send us a board, and they forgot to define a reference plane, and they need impedance matching, okay? So now if you send this board to our AI, it will tell you you have USB, you need to have impedance matching, and you don't have reference plane.

You need to add the GND plane in a layer one, let's say.

And the AI tells you, do you want me to do it for you? You say yes, and it adds it for you.

It tells you for EMA, it's better to have a power layer.

This is probably a good segue into maybe doing a demo.

so

what you're seeing is the interface of dpcb so the web app not the api as of right now and a couple of things to say before we we get into the the actual routing and if you start exploring what dpcb saying is on the on the right hand side here It says GND is signal and power is signal.

You may not want this because if you do this, then what's going to happen after you start the routing, let's say, whatever, I just go there after like one hour, is that you're going to have traces everywhere.

A difference of more than about 0.5 volts across the run suggests a wiring or connection issue.

Earth faults.

The earth, main negative, return path is as important as the positive supply and is more commonly neglected.

A poor earth connection causes all manner of odd faults, lights that flicker, appliances that work intermittently, readings that don't make sense.