[Elecraft] Surface Mount tech et. al.

[Bob Alkire]

As stated earlier, surface mount is intended for automated manufacture and 
ranges from be difficult to being down-right impractical for traditional 
kit building. On the production floor, surface mount can't be beat but it 
requires a jewelers touch for hand construction.

I do surface mount construction when I make prototypes. Most contract 
manufacture houses will build you prototypes by hand but they usually don't 
like it.

I use a Weller 1302B 20Wt iron with an EC2002 station. I have a EC1201 for 
some of the smaller part removal and Plato makes a series of compatible 
tips for this purpose. I also have a vacuum tool for lifting and placing 
parts and tweezers and orange sticks for positioning.  I use a Meiji EMZ 
Microscope with fiber optic lighting for making the parts look big. Even 
so, there is still a lot of surface mount parts that are beyond my 
capability including fine pitch quad flat packs and ball grid arrays. I 
like surface mount parts, my labstock is physically small, parts are 
generally cheaper - but the average kit builder isn't going to want to 
invest into the tools to build with all but the small pin count stuff.

I found for digital designs where pin count <= 40 and frequency is < 80MHz, 
through-hole parts are widely available. Even some of the larger ICs like 
the complex programmable logic (CPLDs) or field programmable gate arrays 
(FPGAs) come in PLCC packages which can be socketed on through hole 
sockets. There are chips that only come as surface mount and are finding 
their way into ham rigs such as high performance DSPs.

The Orion was mentioned, I take it this is Ten Tec's new transceiver which 
has two SHARC DSPs. Isn't the Orion only being sold only as factory 
assembled? I couldn't find anything about that on their site. It's 
certainly has an impressive number of knobs and buttons and it cost $3300. 
I did look up the SHARC processor on analog devices site and it comes in a 
fine pitch quad flat pack or ball grid array package.

73's
Bob AF6J