VHF dipper - a simple resonant frequency meter

a simple resonant frequency meter Way back when electronics was still young (shortly after the stone age) when grids, anodes and cathodes were all the rage, this device would have been called a grid dipper. Now it is more likely to be called a dip meter or a transistor dipper. No matter what it is called it is still the same instrument, and in the handy transistorised form shown here it is an indispensable aid for any HF handyman. Before we start describing the cir- cuit, we must first establish exactly what a dip meter is. A dip meter could be considered as a sort of fre- quency meter whose purpose in life is to define the resonant frequency of LC circuits. The circuits do not have to "radiate" (in other words, they do not have to be in an oscil- lator circuit), as they can be measured, or, to be more exact, dipped, "loose". To see how this works we can best go straight to the circuit diagram. The parts that make up a dip meter are always the same: a tunable oscillator, a rectifi...