Practical Radio Frequency Workshop Welcomes Bristol Uni Students and Industry Professionals—A Great Success!
After a hugely successful pilot with our undergraduate students last year, we launched our first steady-state practical Radio Frequency workshop—an exciting, hands-on experience designed to complement the Foundations of RF Engineering online course on Connected Worlds.
The event brought together both postgraduate and undergraduate students, as well as industry professionals, who worked alongside our skilled academics, an experienced designer from Rohde & Schwarz, and our dedicated technical staff.
Participants had to come prepared—having passed an online test and worked on the design of several RF circuits using the Cadence AWR simulator before attending—which meant that in just one and a half days, they accomplished a lot:
Activity 1 - Transmission Line Design & Fabrication with Copper Tape
- Designed and implemented microstrip transmission lines with specific characteristic impedances
- Practised shunt stub matching and quarter-wave transformer techniques




Activity 2 - Matching Network Design
- Used a predefined PCB layout to design two L-section matching networks, as well as Pi and T networks
- Factored in board layout constraints and a limited set of component values in both simulations and final designs




Activity 3 - Amplifier Design
- Designed, implemented and tested their own general-purpose RF amplifier from scratch using a versatile PCB layout
- This included bias network design, stabilisations and simultaneous conjugate matching


You can learn more about each activity by visiting the relevant page in the Foundations of RF Engineering course. Joining the online course is completely free! Links to each activity are provided below.
Activity 1 - Transmission Line Design & Fabrication with Copper Tape
Activity 2 - Matching Network Design
Activity 3 - Amplifier Design
Feedback from Attendees
Q: We believe that a paradigm shift is needed for CPD courses. Attendees should be given ample time to prepare at their own pace, ensuring they arrive at workshops with the knowledge needed to make the most of the activities offered. Having experienced our online course on Connected Worlds and its companion workshop, what are your thoughts on this?
"I think it's a great approach: the online materials were very in-depth and useful, and really helped prepare me for the in person labs. Great!" (Quinn P., Light Trace Photonics)
Q: How would you rate the overall level of difficulty of the lab activities included in the workshop?

Q: Please rate the statements below

Q: What specific aspects of the labs did you find most helpful or enjoyable?
- Implementation of the practical experiments and comparing the experimental results to simulations.
- Design and implementation of microstrip lines. It gives a practical insight into radio frequency engineering in general.
- I loved being able to choose my components and soldering them onto the board, it made the work feel more independent and engaging.
- Using the network analysers and seeing live results on the smith chart.
- Seeing the results of the experiment using the VNA and comparing it to simulation results.
- I found it very useful to design and pick out correct components with the simulator. Making measurements along the way to verify each step really aided in my understanding.
- Validating simulations against the measured designs since they got me thinking about how to further change my simulation's model to better match the measured results.
Q: How would you rate the overall usefulness of the lab sessions in understanding RF circuits?
