Trimpot with decent rotational life?

Ah, I thought you were putting a board onto the pot to make connections to it. Pretty common technique in some quarters- a little transition board with a connector.

--sp

Here's an encoder mounted on a baby board.

The four spacers are also the electrical connections.

Oh well maybe, I thought Phil was sticking a big ass pot through a pcb. Doesn't matter.

I'm mostly an idiot when it comes to mechanical layout. On my first instrument, (for money rather than one-of's in labs.) I used those pots at right angles from front panel to pcb, but didn't mechanically secure the alignment enough... (Forget shake machines, just mail packages to yourself via UPS.) When ~50% (or so.) were broken on arrival we had to change things.

George H.

If you think their skills are adequate you could use through hole trimpots in TO-5 sockets or whatever suitable socket you find and a bag of spare trimpots with instructions on how to swap trimpots when worn!

piglet

Hmmm, for pots I recall a thumb rule of f x R < 1E6... I would have thought that perhaps a small, low R trimpot might be usable at 100MHz. Did you really got them working as expected at 1 GHz?

Pere

Yes, we've tested trimpots up there.

Most pots have a convoluted geometry inside, that adds capacitance and inductance. Some tiny pots are more sensible.

This Bourns pot has the convoluted geometry

and this 7-cent Murata part

doesn't.