[Amps] World's worst coax connectors

[Jim Garland]

As you probably know, the  famous Art of Electronics, by Paul Horowitz 
(W1HFA) and Winfield Hill, is the comprehensive go-to bible for hams and 
other electronics devotees. Published by Cambridge University Press. H 
and H  offers the following assessment of the ubiquitous RCA phono  
connector.

"The so-called phono jack used in audio equipment is a nice lesson in 
bad design, because the inner conductor mates before the shield when you 
plug it in; furthermore, the design of the connector is such that both 
shield and center conductor tend to make poor contact. You've 
undoubtedly /heard/ the results! Not to be outdone, the television 
industry has responded with its own bad standard, the type F coax 
"connector," which uses the unsupported inner wire of the coax as the 
pin of the male plug, and a shoddy arrangement to mate the shield."

Having lived and suffered with RCA phono jacks for many decades, I agree 
completely with this assessment. That presumably smart Collins engineers 
decided it was acceptable to pump a hundred watts of RF through a phono 
jack on an otherwise finely engineered radio seems to me to be an 
inexplicably poor decision. It is surpassed only by the equally 
unfortunate decision to route deadly high voltage through a (thankfully 
obsolete) one-pin Cinch-Jones connector which has no shield or ground 
connection.

  73,

Jim W8ZR (who is in a cranky mood, today)