Hey folks,
How reliable are SMT MMCX connectors? There seems to be a significant retaining force with MMCX connectors. We will be using a type of FR-4 so the peel strength should be adequate.
Something like this
(Horrible link and quirly PDF file)
Anyone use these? There will not be a lot of mating/unmating going on, just the occasional reconfiguring. I'm just visualising the whole thing coming right off the board.
Scairy. The pads will be small and MMCX's can have huge detent forces. I'd go with something less agressive, MCX or SMB, or thru-hole if you really need MMCX.
John
Not personally, but some other people around here have done so, and the results weren't pretty: Even with a good soldering job, if you try to disconnect a cable at anything other than normal to the SMT connector, there's a good chance you'll rip the connector off the board (and if you do, it's usually at least 10 minutes of dicking around to manually re-solder the thing... assuming you didn't rip off the PCB pad in the process...). Hence, unless you absolutely, positively can't come up with the board space for a through-hole connector, I'd suggest avoiding them. (That's what happened here... supposedly there wasn't enough room on the PCB for the through-hole versions, but of course there *was* time to re-spin the board after we ripped enough of the SMT ones off and did switch...)
We were using a mix of cables with right-angle and straight connectors on them -- the "right-angled" cables are (not surprisingly) a little worse when it comes to applying disconnect force off the normal and ripping off the connector.
---Joel
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