Hi Gerald,
You make a good point, BUT -- I've heard nightmare stories from good
engineers sourcing products from Chinese sources, evaluating samples,
and early shipments that looked great, worked great, tested really well,
and then a few shipments later getting stuff that looked nothing like
the original product, or that were unsatisfactory in important ways.
If you as a vendor are able to do that testing and guarantee that those
products are first quality, and that they remain first quality, that's
fine. But that's easier said than done -- how much incoming QC can you
afford to do (or are you capable of)?
Like Roger, I've encountered Amphenol 83-1SPs that were short a thread.
Not a lot, perhaps 1%. It didn't make me happy.
Until recently, W2VJN advertised Amphenol connectors on his relay boxes.
When I ordered them, he said he no longer did, and was using another
"good" connector. Because he used the chassis as signal return rather
than a continuous ground layer on the PC board, Because the VSWR got
nasty above about 15M and I wanted to route my SteppIR through 2x1 box,
I had to modify the 2x1 boxes to provide that path to clean up the VSWR.
That meant I had to add braid from the shield ring to the PC board, and
braid following the signal path. When I did that, I could no longer
tighten down the connectors well, and they spun when I tightened the coax.
I've modified one of those boxes to replace the connectors with the
4-hole flange connectors. It was a lot of work. So was fixing the
circuit layout issue.
73, Jim K9YC
On Mon,5/25/2015 12:45 PM, TexasRF--- via TowerTalk wrote:
Hi Jim, I think you are being overly critical of the imported connectors
and adapters. These days virtually all connectors come from China, regardless
of the brand.
There was a time, back maybe 10 years or more ago, that your criticism was
warranted. There was certainly a lot of junk out there. In more recent
years several west coast wholesale connector supply companies have been
offering Chinese connectors with excellent quality, decent prices and quick
delivery, usually from stock.
We resell these connectors to our customers and see very few problems with
them. I use them in my own station at frequencies up to 10 GHz and see no
issues.
Even the right angle adapters work as expected; no internal springs for the
center conductor as reported in the past.
73,
Gerald Williamson K5GW
GM Texas Towers
In a message dated 5/24/2015 8:37:00 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
jim@audiosystemsgroup.com writes:
On Sun,5/24/2015 5:55 PM, Steve Maki wrote:
Right, and then using a relatively inexpensive N to UHF adapter if you
need to get to the UHF connector series.
Quality (Amphenol) N to UHF adapters are NOT inexpensive. The ones that
ARE inexpensive are JUNK, and should be avoided. When I got back on the
air around 2003 after a long absence, I filled my junkbox with these
JUNK connectors, and soon lived to regret it. Over the next 3-5 years, I
experienced at least six failures that were the result of those JUNK
connectors.
Do yourself a favor -- don't buy no-name connectors. I'm talking about
those pretty, shiny connectors sold at hamfests, and, sadly, by most
vendors who advertise in QST and CQ. We must go to vendors like Allied,
Newark, and DigiKey to get the real deal.
73, Jim K9YC
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