"mostly free hanging in air above a copper ground plate" It is impressive work, both for people inside and outside the industry. I've built a lot of RF stuff

"mostly free hanging in air above a copper ground plate" It is impressive work, both for people inside and outside the industry. I've built a lot of RF stuff that way, his technique is "normal". What impresses me about the quality of his work is there's no solder or flux splashes on the board and none of the wires have been burned by the iron and the board isn't tarnished like an old copper penny from all the handling. Also there's no visible reworking. A lot of people buy non-inductive carbon comp many meg value resistors for use as standoffs which I didn't see in the pixs I saw. Most relatively low impedance ckts laugh at being shorted to ground by 8.2 megs yet it can be physically useful to anchor connections. Another option I've done and seen others do is take a piece of PCB and chop it into squares and stick the squares on the groundplane with glue or solder. I've had unfortunate incidents with the "hacksaw a grid of isolated squares" where the hacksaw didn't isolate the squares so I haven't done that since the 80s, but others have better luck. I've had extremely mixed results making microstripline using a shear and soldering the strips into place. You can buy pre-etched boards to support ground plane construction, including little boards when you need some SMD. I've done the "flip the chip over, super glue, and solder wire wrap wires to the leads" but its not fun. I made a complete 80M ham radio receiver back in the 80s using the ARRL Hayward "radio amateur solid state design" or something like that, the title was all generic words you can't google for, using that construction technique. The brown book with the 70s era power RF transistor on the front cover (back in the bad old days when like 100 watt device cost like half a car payment and blew up if you looked at it wrong and was made of beryllium oxide heat sink and came with a toxic waste shipment bag for when you disposed of it). Anyway it looked like a war relic by the time I was done. I think I built at least two VFOs and three mixers by the time I was done (different designs, troubleshooting to get lower drift, etc) and things gradually got trashed as I modified endlessly. I'm not sure every stage was simultaneously 100% perfect at any time, but at one time or another every stage at least momentarily worked. The truly skilled make things look easy that are actually pretty well impossible, which makes the article very impressive.