[Milsurplus] A thought on capacitors -

[Mark J. Blair]

On Feb 1, 2013, at 16:39 , John Hutchins <jphutch60bj at gmail.com> wrote:
>   The surface mount caps that are now available are there carriers available on the marked to use in wired applications?


I haven't seen anything made specifically for that purpose. I've occasionally soldered wires onto the ends of surface mount caps while debugging boards in the lab, where I needed to add a capacitance at a node that didn't already have pads on the board. This was just for experimental purposes, and was a matter of doing it "right now" with whatever I had on hand. Otherwise, I would have ordered leaded caps.

I uses leaded components when repairing equipment that uses them, but all of my new designs (both at work and at play) use surface mount components almost exclusively. At work, I get to do things like cramming an entire GPS receiver into less than 50 mm^2. My hobby designs aren't that sexy, but I still use surface mount components and multi-layer PCBs since that's what I know how to do.

It would certainly be possible to manufacture tiny PCBs with a pair of surface mount pads for a particular size of capacitor, and a pair of through-hole pads to add wires. You could solder on a cap, solder on a pair of wire leads, and then optionally dip the whole thing in epoxy. I don't see the point, though, as that would be a lot more expensive than just buying a suitable leaded capacitor. Am I missing something?


-- 
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/