Have you ever thrown a shopping cart out of a convertible at 80 mph to observe the sparks? How about hooking up a power amplifier to 115 volts AC just to see how it craters? Your fellow engineers have done these things and more! If you have a great picture of totally destroyed hardware, or a photo of a blown circuit, send it to webmaster@microwaves101. If it gets on the web site you will receive a free Microwaves101 key chain pocket knife! Impress your friends, if not your boss!

Note to mortuary fans: we put the new stuff here at the top, but the older disasters are still here too--just scroll down.

New for May 2008! This photo came from Dave.

Here's what happens to a static discharging style lightning arrestor when it is in-line with a poorly tuned antenna, Hi-SWR! Burnt enamel wire and toroid core fractured.

I thought I had properly adjusted my vertical antenna for 80M, then hit it with 1 KW from the linear....arc popping and spitting in the amp and no output until I removed this arrestor.

Click image for closeup.

New for May 2008! These came from Nameless Satellite Guy sometimes known as Charlene when he's playing dressup. Click the images to supersize the damage!

Here are photos of what happens when you aren't careful when running a CS01 test, causing two 1-ohm current sense resistors to set fire to their Uralane coating.

New for May 2008 (we've been having a busy month!) This set came from Tim from MN, who simply states:

Apparently ‘school bus’ exceeds the mil spec of this portable radio.

New for April 2008! These two photos came from Zhang in Beijing, illustrating a mechanical interference problem...

Below are two pictures I took when I worked on one SNG truck (SNG means Satellite News Gathering, it is from the Digital Broadcasting Standards of Europe.) It was interesting , it is a dual frequency band system both C and Ku, (See PIC 1), but it seems like they forgot something: when the antenna rotated, the output flange of the C waveguide will be obstructed by the Ku waveguide. (See PIC2).

Finally they made the system work--good job. Well I think it is still a good experience to remember.

New for March 2008! Here's some photos of a board roast from Bob:

I’m submitting pictures of a VME daughter card that failed rather dramatically. The source of the short is unknown, but you can see the extensive fusing and charring on the daughter card plus the proximity burns to the main card. More than a few errant amps went through the wrong path I dare say. In addition to the unmistakable smell of “smoke being let out of chips”, actual smoke was seen coming out of the chassis in question.

 

We've posted some closeup photos here, here, and here. Someone open a window, that smell is overpowering...

Here's another submission that's new for March 2008! This almost unbelievable example of microwave connector abuse came from Liam:

We found this in our lab a while ago. We never found out who did it but personally I feel that tar and feathering would be too good for them.

New for December 2007! This just in from Pat:

Please see the attached photo for the mortuary. Failure analysis: component has seen an over-current. Overcurrents may happen when you apply 50kV across a device that typically sees 500V. This was operator error. Also, I am looking into making the enclosure squirrel tight after viewing other postings. The IGBT is an amazing device that compliments the power switch tube, just don't push either to 100X their rating. From a technical note it would seem that current is free in a solid state device and voltage is expensive. The vacuum electron device (tube) has free high voltage and expensive current. I really like your website, it reminds me of RF Cafe before all the advertising.

Click on the image to "zoom in"!

New for October 2007! The following four photos came in from Alex, from across the pond.

1. A colleague, whilst on his honeymoon in Cork, Ireland, was confused as to why the TV picture in their B&B was so bad. Wishing to investigate further (being an RF engineer) he followed the cable to discover it led outside of the room window. He peered outside to find this fine example of an Irish “lossless” TV signal splitter:

(Note to viewers: the above reference could perhaps be construed as a slur against the great people of Ireland. We don't want anyone to think we're insensitive here at Microwaves101, indeed, one of the principals of M101 came from a "two-toilet Irish" neighborhood near Boston before she married above herself! - UE)

Note to readers: the following photo might just be the best one on the page, and for sure it will be downloaded and pated into ESD training manuals all over the world. Just remember where you found i and give Alex (and Microwaves101) credit!

2. An ESD inspector had kittens when he found this high-isolation ESD lead attached to a bench grounding point!

New for September 2007! Here's two photos submitted by Mark. Don't look at the second photo right before lunch. Here's the story:

I work at a C-band shuttle tracking facility at KSC (Kennedy Space Center). After a launch and several weeks of downtime, we went back to the site to bring up the system. Everything booted up nicely but the pull-out keyboard and monitor did not work. We unscrewed the top of the flip-up keyboard and monitor assembly and WHOA!

A real nice stench and a whole lot of dead mice… not to mention some circuit board problems.

Here's the toe-tagged hardware that was acting up...

and here's what's going on inside. Gnarly! Next call the Orkin Man, before you call Tech Support. Click on the photo for a higher resolution image if you like.

In case you were wondering where the nest material came from...

There's a few more photos of this mess, if anyone's interested just ask!

New for September 2007! These photos came from Iraq, by way of Steve. These are two dishes at a Forward Operating Base in the Baghdad area. No, Dick Cheney was not hunting in the area, instead they were clobbered by debris from a 107mm rocket that impacted the corner of the rooftop (the 3rd picture). Here's some excerpts from one of Steve's emails:

There was a note in our orientation papers about knives, saying something to the effect of, "you only need a pocket knife. If the enemy has gotten past the walls, concertina wire, armed guards and machine guns, and through all the armed personnel walking around base, a bowie knife isn't going to help." I don't care. I take an Applegate-Fairbairn with me in my travel bag every time I get on a helicopter and it makes me happy.

I'm on Camp Liberty which is one of the several bases built around the Baghdad airport. It's fairly civilized, you wouldn't guess we were at war sometimes, at least until a rocket lands a couple hundred yards away. It's godawfully dusty, the dirt turns into talcum powder an inch thick in some places. A few of Saddam's old palaces are built out here, so we have a few lakes and some interesting architecture to look at, not all of them are bombed out so that's kind of cool, I need to get into some of them and crawl around. Rumor has it that if you go to the no-man's land between base and the public side of the airport, you can get all sorts of things -- cars, guns, etc. I need to find out more about this.

Spare parts are interesting. Get what you can, when you can and preferably two of them is the rule of thumb. I work with Raytheon, and they do a pretty nice job of keeping us in stock with what we need. Praise the lord for e-commerce and shipping to APO addresses, we can mail order just about anything we want so that's pretty cool.

Click on Steve's photos to see full-sized images!

New for July 2007! These photos came from Stephen from Pennsylvania. This is what happens when you run 1kW at S-Band through your stripline hybrid coupler. Don't try this at home unless you do it in waveguide. Hmm, maybe there's a rule of thumb here somewhere...

Also New for July 2007! These "cobra pictures" came in from Nino from Argentina, no explanation offered, none needed!

New for June 2007! This is from The Emperor of Leesburg... A friend of mine in Colonia NJ had a new phone line put in last weekend. Check out the photo, observe the perfect placement of the drill bit going right through the electric service cable. Since the installer shorted the line upstream of the breaker panel, the only thing that stopped the fireworks was the wire burning open. I wonder how fast the meter was spinning for the 20 seconds or so when the lights were flickering in the whole neighborhood? The technician is lucky to be alive, and the homeowner is also lucky that his house didn't burn down.

I guess this could have been done by Verizon, or the cable TV company, or the satellite company. They all show up at your house with the same 2-foot long drill bit, and their technicians are all about as well trained.

A local electrician fixed the mess that Saturday evening. and Verizon paid it, somewhere north of $1200. There is also some obvious damage to the house which Verizon is going to have to pay for but has not yet done so. The electrician asked the Verizon guy if he would pick a lottery number for him, since his luck was so good.

We've got a feeling this picture is going to get more than 15 minutes fame, expect to see it on an Official Safety Poster soon (especially if you work for Verizon...). Think before you drill! If anyone wants to buy the original full sized picture (it has remarkable detail), make us an offer and we'll pass it on to the lucky homeowner...

Update July 2007... here's a picture of the temporary fix that PSEG did before the
electrician showed up...

New for June 2007! This from William: This is a picture of a (large microwave company located along the Route 495 Rust Belt) switch that we blew up in a circuit. This switch is only rated for 20 dBm peak power (absolute maximum) but we were using it in a circuit where the power was 1 W CW. We had a lot of fun blowing up a lot of switches on purpose as we researched the problem and looked for a solution (using a thermal camera to view the junction we could see that the switch went kapooooww at about +230 degC junction temp). We were eventually able to get this switch to work nicely in the application (still required 1W avg power) and had a lot of fun in the process.

Hey, that looks a lot like this product. - UE

Also new for June 2007! This from John: We were testing TO-247 "300 watt" power mosfets to see how long they would last at 300 watts actual dissipation, pulsed load, bolted directly to a copper block. We ran them at 300 watts until they exploded, and many would not make it past 50 milliseconds. We wound up with an Ixys p-channel part and an IR n-channel. This is for an MRI gradient coil driver with about 17KW peak output, 32 fets on a huge heatsink with copper heat spreaders.

New for April 2007! Here's an RF cable with a problem, it got chewed up by a positioner! Submitted by Andy, an 18 year old lad doing an internship with a microwave company in the UK. Thanks for thinking of us, Andy!

New for April 2007! This just in from Tony... Ever wonder why digital cellphones suck? If this level of engineering is any example, it should be crystal clear. OK, so the link would only suffer when the wind was blowing in a certain range of azimuth. The impact on the PCS sectors might be less, due to the lower frequency but good grief. Do people not get basic concepts anymore? Did they ever know them in the first place? What are they teaching in schools these days? Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong?

OK, so if the blades are nonmetallic composite, its still a big slab of dielectric material, moving through the link path (or one or more sectors) at a time, varying in thickness...multipath? Doppler shift? If there is any metallic structure it gets even more stupefying. Names, companies and location withheld to protect the RF physics
impaired.

New for March 2007! This Agilent ESA-L1500A/E4411A 9 kHz-1.5 GHz spectrum analyzer was for recently sale on Ebay a "buy it now" for $1299. It's not worth 1299 cents! Seller "Effy6" has 100% positive feedback, and warns: Sold AS-IS, no returns and refunds. We wonder if it powers up? Contributed by Kerry from down under!

Also new for March 2007! Here's a FET that is a little shy on gain... check out the source bridge on this FET! Near as we can figure, the bonding tool got a little too close and mangled the bridge without actually breaking it. Amazingly, it still worked! (with about 4 dB lower gain than its undamaged brothers). It was delivered that way from a reputable supplier that shall rename nameless, only because we weren't given the info, not because we're scared of them! This fine bonding job have been done by an engineer, not a tech. Contributed by Dr. Matt of NRAO!

New for January 2007! These photos came from Michael. "Here are a few shots of an 3 kWHPA power supply that overheated and suffered a severe meltdown".... Someone call 911! If you click on any of the pictures you can view an even bigger image of destruction.

New for November 2006! This from Dave from down under... The attached photos used to be a Centellax broadband amplifier. Then a pair of tweezers happened to be in contact with the gate and drain at the same time. The magic smoke was grey and the chip glowed red for a brief instant. Need I say any more?

New for October 2006! This from Robert: results of a little "Arcy-Sparky". This is an RMA from Florida. Seems like one of the hurricanes decided to dissipate some of the built up energy into our I/O card. Results = malfunction, cratered chips.

New for September 2006! Here's two photos of an FM transmitter that was damaged during a storm, from Enrique! Looks like it is all over but the insurance settlement...

The original of this picture is huge and high resolution, if you want to see it in all it's glory just click the image below!

This item is called a capacitor security valve.

New for August 2006! Here's a contribution from down under... it's a thermal image of a piece of CPWG on garden-variety FR4 trying to pass 100W of 900MHz RF! It survived almost one minute before turning the copper into a flaming vapour. Thanks, Max!

New for July 2006! This just in from Fred the Man: "we had a fun mishap with a temp chamber. The software locked up over the weekend, holding the chamber cold for a couple of days instead of cycling. We have a humidifier in the room to reduce ESD." We wonder if the software guy helped mop up the mess Monday afternoon when it thawed out... or was too busy writing a macro to send out resumes.

New for July 2006! This is what happens when your power amp supplier doesn’t believe your advice about their harmonic filter design. From Matt!

New for February 2006! This just in from NASA! This is what's left of the first stage of an 80-1000 MHz high power amplifier. BOOM! Thanks, Justin!

New for January 2006! As JarJar Binks' buddy would say, "ouch time!" Below are some of the leftovers from a shoot down at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, donated by our army buddy Steve! As we like to say, this type of activity should DEFINITELY void the warrantee. Can't quite make out the part in the center, but Trak and Celeritek might have some ugly field returns coming in.

Also new for January 2006! These pictures came from Tres Huevos. What you see represents a very bad day at work. Here's the story: an employee was hired to do laser sealing, but received very little training. He was sealing a package, and programmed the laser incorrectly. The laser started to burn a hole across the lid, out of control....

So the new employee decides to stop the later by putting his finger over it. Yikes! Needless to say, Clean Harbors had to clean up all the bloody mess, and the employee "retired" on disability, with one less working digit! And of course, the rest of the team had to suffer a demeaning lecture from Captain Safety!

Here's a look at the destruction inside the package... no wonder they wanted to put a lid on it, look at all of those ugly jumpers!

New for October 2005: Tony sent in this picture from an AM transmitter cable, that apparently worked better than it looks... we're wondering how many kilowatts this bad boy had to carry! He submitted this caption: "please just say no to home brew heliax connectors. New connectors are not that expensive compared to what you pay for the cable. Besides, some jerk with a digital camera will take a picture of it and send it to Microwaves101!"

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New for October 2005: Frank has sent us a couple of pictures that illustrate what NOT to do during qualification. "During the EMI portion of qual testing at an outside testing facility a power supply failed and applied line voltage to a DC input. Unfortunately the unit was sealed at this point so there was no fire or magic smoke to be seen. I just love the way the the legs were burned right off the regulator (in the second picture). No we won't be using that facility's services again."

New for September 2005: we've got four new photos of mass destruction... don't tell "W" or he might invade this peaceful third-world website!

Let's start with this photo of a burned Ku-band waveguide window, courtesy of "HP". He was running at 18.3 GHz doing some critical pressure testing when it rapidly started to lose vacuum in the TVAC chamber. It's a good guess that this W/G window didn't like drastic pressure changes while passing 100 watts! We'd guess that voids the warrantee. Nice photo, tell us the camera model and we'll look for one on Ebay...

Now let's admire two photos from the admirable "NS6Y". Here's a nice little RF switch, N to SMA, but looks like it got a little lightning hit! Hmm, are SMA connectors usually black like that? Meanwhile inside, everything looks OK, except that burnt smell that
just won't go away.....

NS6Y also sent along some "better living tips" which were no doubt rejected by that scourge of the airwaves, HGTV... a whole new take on "microwaves for the kitchen...

"Living in the Bay Area as I do, I know: balsamic vinegar tastes good! But, the lousy cork stopper broke! Wah! Well, good old Caplugs (popular dust caps for rf/microwave connectors) to the rescue, I think this is about the size for a GR-900 connector, it saved the day! Like any rf/microwave person, I collect those Caplugs obsessively and have a nice bin of them."

NS6Y, next time we're up the coast, how about fixing us a little lunch?

Below is a picture we took. Here's a new use for your microwave oven... got some "proprietary" data you want to eliminate? Nuke it for five seconds in the ol' Amana, and even the CIA couldn't pin that alleged white collar crime on you! Here's our page on microwave heating, it's just getting started.

New for July 2005: Tk is a Microwaves101 fan and has his own gallery of connector and cable horrors (plus tons of other unrelated pictures), here's a link to it, but we warn you that you might encounter certain four-letter words that we don't use on the "professional" resource that is Microwaves101.com! Here's two samples. The wirecloset photo is before Tk reworked it. The Nextel picture makes us want to switch to Cingular, read the message on the phone!

New for June 2005: contributed by Lou from Honeywell in Kansas City. The title of this gem is appropriately "too much drain current". We'd guess about six amps too much... next time set the current limit on the supply for Chrissakes! Click on the small picture to admire a larger image!

New for February 2005: contributed by Ed - WB6CFW from Sunnyvale, here is a photo of a solar electric charge controller that was in the power system of a microwave repeater site somewhere in China. The suspicion is that lightning had something to do with the extensive damage. Morningstar, the manufacturer reported never having seen anything as bad as this one. Of course, the customer was asking for a warrantee replacement... Excellent photo, Ed!

New for January 2005: here is an example of why you can't just "throw around a football" in your yard in Tucson Arizona! OK, it is not a microwave picture, but a disaster nonetheless!

New for December 2004: here is a waveguide adapter employing split-block construction. The seam is in the worst possible place, and it has solder voids inside. We have a separate page explaining why this adapter is worthless.

New for July 2004: here is some mice damage from a remote transmitter terminal. This photo was taken after the other mess that the critters made was wiped up. Photo contributed by Jonathan Zane, a.k.a. KC2SHO!

In this second photo from Jonathan, we see a "field return" unit that probably doesn't smell so good either...

How's this for a blown ceramic capacitor? This was a DigiKey Panasonic cap, rated at 100 volts. It blew with only 28 volts on it, and it sure stunk up the lab! Gonna have to return it and get $1 credit on the next order...

Here's a contribution from the Unknown Editor hisself. Known to occasionally hang drywall on the side (we don't pay him that much), this is a picture of a tape measure that almost killed The Man. "I was up on a ladder using the tape to locate a hole for a ceiling light. It was extended maybe six feet to the wall, when it decided to droop down. Right into the 200 amp service panel, which was missing its cover (awaiting the drywall). The tape lodged itself between ground and one of the hot strips, and exploded into flames. I found myself tugging on it, I didn't like the idea of it being stuck in there. I can't say why I didn't get the shock of my life, except that I was 'chosen' by aliens to do this web site. I wonder if this voids the warrantee?"

Everyone who knows him knows that the Unknown Editor thinks that Hewlett Packard computers completely stink. It stinks squared if you are a small business that has only a couple of HP boxes that you depend on and can ill afford any trouble from one of them. Maybe six months out of the box, and you get the mysterious system lockup problem. You HP owners know what we're talking about. The keyboard freezes, and you have to reboot by pulling the power cord (or pushing the power button for at least ten seconds if you happen to read the directions (which we never do). Once or twice and this would be a nuisance. Five times a day and you start to lose your mind. Hp's technical hotline keeps telling you to replace stuff like the hard drive, the modem, and eventually the motherboard. They tell you "you need more memory", then "you have too much memory", then "why don't you replace all the memory?" Hewlett and Packard meanwhile are doing grave spins at 33 RPM. About time someone did something about this travesty...

Here at Microwaves101, we have an HP Pavilion computer that literally cost us 10 times more in killed productivity and repair charges than its purchase price, which was more than a comparable Dell (we were stupid). We are about to get even. We now have on hand a large bag of Mexican M-80 firecrackers (approximately 1/4 stick of dynamite) which we will use to blow up the HP box while we record it digitally for permanent display in the Mortuary. Below are some preview pictures of this impending catastrophe; stay tuned and come back soon to see the results... anyone have Carly Fiorini's email address so we can send her this data?

Below are three shots of a crashed Cascade Microtech Ka-band RF probe where the center conductor has lifted off of the teflon insulator (so they are no longer co-planar). Two things about this incident... the guy who crashed this probe into a second probe is six foot six and looks like he might know his way around a boxing ring, so there's no way to give him any crap about it. We just said "thank you sir for all of your help!" And second, the Cascade Microtech bastards wouldn't fix either of the two crashed probes, claiming that they won't touch anything that is over a year old! But they were more than happy to ship us two new probes overnight for $1400...

What's that below, one "slightly used" HP 4034A meter? Our largest exhibit yet, we're told this unit actually still works! Maybe if you're lucky you can pick up a similar unit on Ebay.

Ed Nisley sent us this picture of blasted RF connectors. He says "These are connectors I salvaged from a friend's satellite TV installation after a lightning stroke hit the LNA. It chewed up a security system, flashed a square yard of aluminum off a Celotex panel, punctured an air-conditioner Freon line, and blew out a bunch of RF cabling. Yes, he had lightning protection on the incoming lines. Nothing protects you from a direct hit..." Thanks, Ed, for your thoughtful photo!

Below are three pictures sent in by a fun-loving quality guy with an evil laugh, who who shall remain nameless. The first one is an optical photo of a blown silicon nitride capacitor on a MMIC. Hey, tell the bonding chick to keep all three wires on the bond pad next time!

The second picture is a SEM micrograph of a blown HBT. Tell the process clowns we need a little higher breakdown voltage!

The third photo is another SEM micrograph, this time of a blown bipolar power transistor. Hey Moe, I see the problem, there are too many wires sticking out of it...

Keep those pictures coming in!