16 Oct
2008
16 Oct
'08
7:07 a.m.
Tony Duell schrieb:
nF was common in Europe in the 70's, much less common in the States, I think.
Please don't speak for Europe when talking about GB. In Germany, pF, nF,
and uF are still common nowadays, and everyone uses them where
appropriate. I had to learn about circuits (mostly from US magazines)
that contained rather uncommon values like 2200000pF or 0.000001uF which
would be better understandable when written with less zeros.
>>> The schematic shows the horizontal sync
coupled to a gate via a "2200 mf"
>>> non-polarized cap. I don't know that I have any disc or ceramic caps
that
>> IO think we can instantly eliminat 'mf' == millifarad (which is what it
>> should be!), since that's then 2.2F, which is rediculously large
> Of course. I never thought it was millifarad.
I think in this case it was just sloppyness (or even lack of
understanding, or in best case just a typo) of the circuit designer to
specify 2200mf.
Well, it's what it _should_ be. Mind you,
millifarad is not a
commonly-used unit for some unknown reason (I routinely see capacitors
marked 100000uF rather than 100mF or even 0.1F), although i have seen it
used in, I think, an HP manual
mF has been uncommon because with the exception of gold caps, you rarely
find capacitors with such large capacity, and in common circuits, you
won't need these sizes. For the traditional power supply, I have
seldomly used larger caps than 10000uF; if one needed more, it is more
likely the wrong design has been chosen.
Incidentally, I saw a 2.7kF (no, not a typo!)
low-voltage electrolytic in
a catalogue recently. And to think that when I was at school the physics
'teacher' told us that a 1F capacitor would be 'larger than this room'
and that we'd never seen on. About a week later I dropped a square plasic
object on his deck -- a 1F capacitor that I'd bought from Farnell or
somewhere.
Been there, having done and seen that, most teacher with pure physics
background have no knowledge of practical electronics, so no surprise.
2200nF (==2.2uF) would be possible, but it's a
very odd way to write it.
Yes. This was also written in the 1970s, so I'm
trying historical
interpretation as well as what's obviously written. Err, millimicrofarad = nanofarad. The picofarad is the
micromicrofarad.
I've seen uuF (where the 'u' is actually $\mu$) in old manuals.
Am I the only person to remember the millimicron as an equivalent for nm
when talking about optical wavelengths, etc?
Reminds me of describing speeds as angstrom per fortnight. Infact,
instead of nm, angstrom are frequently still used for wavelengths, but
SI units are supposed to ever have only one single prefix pico, nano,
micro, milli etc. and not combining them as in milli-micro-farad.
OTOH, it might be a selling argument for a CPU with 2 MilliPeta-Hz, and
surely a common distance is more challengingly written as 1000000000000
femtokilometers.
--
Holger