Satway: an analogue electronic circuit design teaching exercise

Abstract

The object of the satway exercise is to give students experience of designing and building analogue electronic circuits using discrete components. It has been designed as a contribution to the EA2 requirements of the Engineering Council and is undertaken by every third-year student on the four year BEng degree in electronics and electrical engineering at the University of Edinburgh. The exercise is to synthesise the electronics to display a television picture on a standard oscilloscope, given a standard 1 V peak-to-peak video signal. On completion, each student has a printed circuit board containing their design which is connected to a standard test jig to verify its functionality. The signal used for the exercise is received from one of the satellites at present broadcasting television signals to the United Kingdom. The exercise draws on material taught to the students in the earlier years of their course. It allows them to use this knowledge in an enjoyable and creative way to produce a working piece of electronic hardware. This exercise is intended to be a halfway house between the highly structured laboratory experiments of the earlier years of the course and the more open-ended type of project work carried out in the final year of the course.