Staggered tuning

Staggered tuning is a technique used in the design of multi-stage tuned amplifiers whereby each stage is tuned to a slightly different frequency. In comparison to synchronous tuning (where each stage is tuned identically) it produces a wider bandwidth at the expense of reduced gain. It also produces a sharper transition from the passband to the stopband. Both staggered tuning and synchronous tuning circuits are easier to tune and manufacture than many other filter types.

The function of stagger-tuned circuits can be expressed as a rational function and hence they can be designed to any of the major filter responses such as Butterworth and Chebyshev. The poles of the circuit are easy to manipulate to achieve the desired response because of the amplifier buffering between stages.

Applications include television IF amplifiers (mostly 20th century receivers) and wireless LAN.

Staggered tuning improves the bandwidth of a multi-stage tuned amplifier at the expense of the overall gain. Staggered tuning also increases the steepness of passband skirts and hence improves selectivity.

The value of staggered tuning is best explained by first looking at the shortcomings of tuning every stage identically. This method is called synchronous tuning. Each stage of the amplifier will reduce the bandwidth. In an amplifier with multiple identical stages, the 3 dB points of the response after the first stage will become the 6 dB points of the second stage. Each successive stage will add a further 3 dB to what was the band edge of the first stage. Thus the 3 dB bandwidth becomes progressively narrower with each additional stage.

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