Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

50%
+3 −3
Q&A Deriving resistor values for a taper pad attenuator

I'm thinking out loud here and haven't solved this yet. This answer is logging my process as I try to solve the problem. It may very well result in the same long-winded process you went thru. No...

posted 2y ago by Olin Lathrop‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Olin Lathrop‭ · 2022-10-09T17:28:40Z (about 2 years ago)
I'm thinking out loud here and haven't solved this yet.  This answer is logging my process as I try to solve the problem.  It may very well result in the same long-winded process you went thru.  Nothing shrewd or insightful is promised.

There are three unknowns (R1, R2, R3), and there are fortunately three constraints:<ol>

<li>The impedance looking into the input must be Rin:

 &nbsp; &nbsp; R1 + R3//(R2 + RL) = Rin

<li>The impedance looking into the output must be RL:

 &nbsp; &nbsp; R2 + R3//(R1 + Rin) = RL

<li>The attenuation must be A.  I think it will be nicer to use gain rather than attenuation, so I'll use G = 1/A.  This constraint is more tricky to write down in a single equation, so I'll use two and the intermediate value Gx.  Gx is the gain from the input to the mid point:

 &nbsp; &nbsp; Gx = R3//(R2 + RL) / [Rin + R1 + R3//(R2 + RL)]

Then the gain at the output is:

 &nbsp; &nbsp; G = Gx * RL / (R2 + RL)

</ol>

Yeah, that looks like it's going to be messy.

The first step is to combine the two equations of constraint three into one, which gets rid of the intermediate value Gx I used for convenience.  Actually that part is easy since its just a straight multiply.  Like I said, this is thought stream dump.  Breaking the third constraint into two wasn't necessary, although it does document the separate thoughts.  Anyway, simplified constraint 3 is:

--- Work in progress ---<br>
I'll get back to this.  I also need to look up how to use MathJax, since these equations are getting too complicated for plain HTML.