On Sep 18, 9:46*am, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
First of all, connectors have a very finite numbers of mate-unmate
cycles in their original design...
most commercial connectors are good for 50 to 200 cycles

That's an awfully small number. A properly manufactured gold-plated
connector should be good for at least 10 times that, shouldn't it?

If you have logic levels in mind, and some noise margin, a slightly
dirty connector is no big issue. Some RF test equipment,
though, has to be concerned with milliohms of resistance,
and can be completely defeated by a small amount of oxide (like,
a copper oxide rectifier making harmonics out of your main signal, or
a mechanical vibration sensitivity - the avionics guys hate that).

So, commercial connectors that are 'good' for 200 cycles are possibly
adequate for 10,000. There's a few critical applications where
connector insertions are counted and connector-replace is performed at
suitable intervals.