If you’ve seen a big air-variable capacitor, you may have noticed that some of the plates may have slots cut into them. Why? [Mr Carlson] has the answer in the video below. The short answer: you can ...

Variable capacitors may be useful, but the air gap that provides their capacitance is their greatest weakness. Rather than deal with the poor dielectric properties of air, some high-end variable ...

How do you implement a variable capacitor these days? Mechanical caps are out. That leaves varactors, which work fine but require higher voltages that often are not available, and their response is ...

This file type includes high resolution graphics and schematics. Cavendish Kinetics now offers a tunable RF micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) capacitor that lets smart-phone antennas cover a ...