Wayne Parham Messages: 18789 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
Most engineers and technicians call a very small potentiometer a "trimming resistor." They are usually 1/4 watt or 1/8 watt units, come in a variety of resitance ranges and they come in 20 turn versions as well, for very fine adjustments. L-Pads are usually rather large, like 10 watt or larger, and they are usually for low impedance circuits, having a low resistance range. They use series/parallel values that are designed to match the total load impedance to what it would have been without the pad. Other than that, they're basically the same thing - a resistor voltage divider.