Miroslav Pokorni wrote:
Well Stan, tell us about 'spot-o-gold'. Was that, by any chance, a flex
Kapton based circuit (flat cable) with gold bumps at the ends and mating
connector had gold surfaces and a pressure plate? If that description fits,
that is a connector that was put out by Hughes Electronics; apparently,
Hughes used it successfully.
Regards
Miroslav Pokorni
OK. I guess there seems to be enough interest in this.
One of my first tasks right after being given the job as the Tektronix Spectrum
Analyzer Sales Engineer in the Pacific Northwest was to call on Boeing and find
out if they were happy with their existing Tek Spectrum Analyzers and see what
more sales potential there was for more.
I noticed that one of the first labs I called on where they were doing radar
cross section tests using silver painted plastic airplane models as targets, was
using their Tektronix 7L18 as a door stop. They said that was the best use they
could make of it since they could never make it work for more than a few minutes
at a time and it had been back to their cal lab dozens of times. They had given
up on it. It never failed them as a door stop . . . !
Checking on this apparent serious reliability problem with the factory, I found
out that instead of using fully gold plated ribbon cable connectors, in an
economy move, Tek had decided to use connectors with only a "spot of gold" right
where the connectors mated to the pins on the circuit board. This turned out to
be a very poor decision and before a permanent cure was implemented, the 7L18
had earned a horrible reputation for poor reliability. The permanent cure was
to pull out and replace every ribbon cable in the 7L18 with new ones using only
completely gold plated connectors. This fixed the probem but not the 7L18's
reputation. This was one of those "problems" that you would rather not publish
on the front page of Electronics News but if you don't, then places like the
internal cal lab at Boeing never learn what the solution is and they can't ever
implement it . . .
I grabbed Boeing's 7L18 and had Factory Service at Tek fix it but it never found
favor with the lab that was using it as a door stop . . . It left a REAL BAD
taste in their mouths.
I don't know where Tek got the actual ribbon cable connectors that they used in
the 7L18 and I don't believe the solution to the problem involved the pins in
the boards . . . just the crimped on ribbon connectors.
I am not aware that this "Spot-O-Gold" connector problem ever showed up in any
other Tek products other than the 7L18. I never heard of it in any other Tek
spectrum analyzers. Maybe Dean knows of other examples of this.
Stan
w7ni@...
