Starting from a schematic and a target gain figure, we worked through the design, picked components, and hand-built the board ourselves — the kind of hands-on circuit work that's easy to talk about in theory and genuinely useful to actually do once.
First bench tests show promising gain figures across the target band, with a bit of tuning needed to keep things stable at the edges of the range.
From here, the plan is to take the amplifier out of the lab and onto the air, and see how it holds up under real operating conditions rather than just on the bench.