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Re: Spot-O-Gold Connectors
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Miroslav Pokorni
The connector/cable that I was thinking of, one put out by Hughes, was named
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'Gold Dot', that name flashed back while reading your mailing. Apparently, that was a reliable connector. The penny pinching on connector of an instrument that was to sell above $13000 in mid 70s money is a fine work of a Harvard Business School graduate; it looks like Tektronix was hit by more than their share of them. As for Tektronix not being able to broadcast about problem with connectors is a pretty feeble excuse, Tektronix had a very good record of where they sold instruments, down to serial numbers. I learned about that in early 80s. When I joined a company in 1980 a new 465B was bought for me; I went on a business trip that stretched into a year long affair and when I got back my scope was gone. There were few new scopes in company but I could not tell which one was mine. Then, I had purchasing to call Tektronix and ask for serial number of the scope that was purchased on specific PO, order for my scope, and sure enough, the serial number was produced. And that was not a bluff, number was real, I did find the scope. So, Tektronix could have used their sales record to contact effected customers, I just think that HBS graduate saw that retrofitting as too high an expenditure and above all a potentially carrier damaging measure, so the customers were left to hang in breeze. Regards Miroslav Pokorni -----Original Message-----
From: Stan or Patricia Griffiths [mailto:w7ni@...] Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2001 11:04 PM To: TekScopes@... Subject: [TekScopes] Spot-O-Gold Connectors 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@... To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: TekScopes-unsubscribe@... Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to |
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