Avian’s Blog

Last week I wrote some thoughts on the design of a bridge-based directional coupler that was published by Henrik Forstén. I re-drew his Gerber files with some minor modifications so that I could order a copy of the PCB and make a coupler to use with my measurement setup. The PCBs and the rest of the components arrived as planned and I spent a morning assembling everything together. As I suspected, it was quite a challenging soldering job. Here are some notes on how it went.

I ordered the PCBs at AISLER. I was surprised to see that they arrived in a little extra breakaway frame you can see above. The width of the PCB is right at the 15 mm limit of what they accept for manufacture, so the frame might be related to that. Or it might be to protect the thin and fragile-looking board from damage during shipping? In any case, all the PCBs arrived in good condition. Unfortunately, the breakaway tabs were again right at the spots where edge-mounted SMA connectors go, so some sanding was necessary after removing the frame.

Soldering the components on the PCB was really tricky - it's a hellish combination of tiny 0402 components, large thermal mass of the SMA connectors and a coax cable with a heat-sensitive insulation. I did it all with my soldering iron and rosin-core Sn-Pn solder. Hot air seemed like a bad choice because it would be hard to avoid heating up the coax too much.

I soldered components in the following order:

1. Tack each SMA connectors in one spot just to hold it in place. This is because if any solder gets (accidentally) deposited onto their footprints it's hard to fit them on the edge of the board.
2. Solder all the 0402 resistors.
3. Solder the coax cable on three spots, leaving only the ground/shield connection at the IN port unsoldered and unconnected. After the shield makes contact to the ground at that point it's impossible to measure with a multimeter if the R3, R4, R5 and R6 are correctly soldered.
4. Finish up soldering of the SMA connectors.
5. Verify that all legs of the bridge have their expected resistances, fix anything that's wrong.
6. Solder the shield of the coax to the ground plane, verify that there is no short between coax core and shield.

Soldering 0402 parts requires a very fine soldering iron tip, however that will not have enough power to heat up the connector and the ground plane. Hence I ended up exchanging tips a few times during assembly. I also adjusted the temperature of the iron as low as I could get it while still melting the solder each time I was doing anything in proximity to the coax cable.

I still messed up the coax once and had to start over. Henrik lists RG-405 coax in his BOM, but I couldn't get this type for a reasonable price and used a type that looked similar. This one has FEP insulation and isn't as heat sensitive as some other cables I've worked with, but it will still soften and melt through if you're not careful.

The spot that gave me the most trouble is the gap where R3 and R4 are placed. Here you have two tiny chips between two huge blobs of solder - the coax shield on one end and the SMA connector shield on the other. I was constantly getting a short with a solder bridge over the gap and the resistors simply floating away on the melted solder. Any solder bridge at that point is hard to remove since it's hard to melt both ends at the same time and not ruin the coax in the process. It took a lot of tries to get to something that wasn't absolutely terrible.

If I would be redoing the PCB I would leave a bit more space for R3 and R4. I had no such problems with R5 and R6 which only have one end embedded in the blob that's holding the coax shield. Also, there's really not enough space to properly land the coax core onto the PCB trace. On the input side the best I could do was to solder the core directly onto the connector pad. On the other side it landed onto the R1. So it would probably be better to leave out the small stubs altogether.

I also suggest changing the connectors to a gold-plated variant. I'm not sure if mine were dirty, but I had problems getting the solder to properly wet their pins. I had no such problems with similar, gold-plated ones on the multiplex board.

A minor thing that bothers me is that ferrite cores are just rattling around. By the ludicrous amount of packaging Mouser put them in for shipping I suspect they get chipped easily. Replacing them would be a nightmare. I'll probably make a small enclosure that will fit snugly over the cut-out to hold the rings and protect them.

In conclusion, assembling these bridges isn't simple. As promised, I've published my modified designs if you want to make your own. After some initial experiments I'm very happy with my copies. I'll publish some measurement results later, but so far they seem to behave very similarly to what Henrik's measurements show.