Making Apollo Coaxial Connectors (Patreon)

Me and Eric spent some time re-making Apollo connectors so we can connect our Transponder, CTE and PMP and other upcoming comms boxes. 

All the audio and IF signals between boxes go through mutli-coax Deutsch connectors. We could not find anywhere, unless we want them re-done for $2,000 a piece and 20 weeks lead time. Here is the one such round connector on top of the CTE box.

Eric made a neat PCB design so we can attempt to make an ersatz connector. They came back from PCBway with the great new grey color that matches our Apollo boxes.

I machined the outer shields on the lathe from brass tubing. 

Eric soldered them onto his PCB. He tried different methods, solder paste and pre-tinning. Pre-tinning worked the best.

He then summoned his inner Louis Rossman and reflowed the whole thing on a hot plate with lots of flux.

He hoped they would self-center but no such luck, so he tweaked their position  manually. We had to rework a few with the soldering iron.

The center pin came from some odd flexible, Swiss-turned pin vintage connectors that came from a batch of parts that a viewer had donated to us previously. Do you happen to know what this was used for?

Here is the PCB with center pins added.

It works great!

For the coax, we plan to use this reel of microcoax donated by Samtec. It is very small yet extremely good, so the mechanical strain and size of the bundle will be considerable reduced from the original, yet with much better performance.

At the end of the day we had enough round connectors for all of our current Apollo comms box interconnects.

We haven't yet found a connector for the high density round connector (not shown here, they are on the uplink and the telemetry equipment, also apparently a Deutsch product) for which we can find no reference. These are going to be a challenge. We might enroll the help of Samtec once again, or if any of you has some in your drawers, we are takers.

Marc