What is a ground plane board?

[toneless]

What is a ground plane board?

Does this mean that any empty places in a pcb should have coper in them
and when they are connected together (with jumpers) can eliminate
noices or signal bleedthrough?

[petemoore]

A ground plane flies under the circuits board,,,lol
 Say you take a sheet of metal and ground it, [circuit ground] and have it flat under the PCB like Dan-0 and Soundtanks do.
 This should make it more stable, lower noise, less chance of heterodyning or cross circuit interferences...whatever heterodyning is.
 Basically this disallows flying elecrons through that plane...the same ones that would 'gather' in the signal path and cause unwanted noises.
 I use RACO ground enclosures, and run longer wires next to the grounded metal surfaces.
 I use wood box...and put a Gndd copper [ground] sheet over urethane or plastic [insulation] sheet [sized just past the circuit boards size] under the circuit board [usually perf].

[puretube]

Toneless: approximately;
but if not layouted well, the g.p. (between the traces) can even cause the opposite...

EDIT: the above concerns a "groundplane" ; what petemoore says cc. the "groundplane board".

[toneless]

Thanks for the replys
I'll have to try this...

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

Unless you have some idea of WHY you are doing it, putting in a ground plane is like randomly punctuating an essay with commas. You won't automatically make it better. Fortunately, at audio frequencies, it isn't near as important as at RF.

[zachary vex]

well, unlike paul, i think a ground plane board is always handy if you have control signals on the same board as audio.

[Paul Perry (Frostwave)]

We're not really in disagreement Zach, a ground plane is a handy thing to have, I just meant to say that if you have a noise problem & you think "no problem, put in a ground plane & all must be well" you might be disappointed.
There is a difference between just filling up spare space on the board & connecting the bits to ground, and having a "real" ground plane across the whole area of the board, as well.

[Peter Snowberg]

In my 2 cents....

A 'real' ground plane board is a 4 layer where one of the layers is used for nothing other than ground distribution. The impedance is as low as it can go and every trace on the board has parasitic capacitance with it. If you combine that with a 'ground fill' or a 'ground pour' on the layers with signal traces, and then add 'guard traces' as shielding around low level signal traces, you get a result that loves to eat RF as well as lots of other noise.

take care,
-Peter

[zachary vex]

i make a thing i call a "ground plane board" that i insert between any of my noisier (digitally controlled) pc boards and the audio jacks in the enclosure.  it's just a pure ground-plane copper board with soldermask on it and one solder point, where i attach a lead and ground it.  it's perfect, because i can isolate one part of the box from another and end any noise problems radiating from the board completely.

of course, paul, i agree that ground planing won't solve all noise ills.

what will, of course, is heavier copper, star grounding, and proper supply filtering (isolation between control and audio circtuits by at least rc filters.)

[petemoore]

I just put a Ground plane underboard of the Obsidian.
 This is in the same box as the LPB1
 I dont notice all that much noise except what sounds like a small motor spinning at about 8,000 RPM when I have the LPB on and the Obsidian off but with the Obsidians gain anywhere past about 7.
 So in this case the ground plane 'just throun' in did less than expectaions were for it to do however reasonable or unreasonable.