I need a number of extender cards for tesing & repairing telecomms system cards... they can't be bought "off the shelf" and I think it would cost about $500/£500 to have someone design one for me... is it quite straight forward to design your own extender card?? (surely it's just case of designing a PCB with connectors on each end?!). Many thanks...

 

You need to consider the particular system you're connecting to. The design must be done carefully so as to not upset the system when connected. Improperly designed externder cards can cause relfections, impeadance mismatches, improper loading and other nasites. If you system is low frequency, then you have some wiggle room in your design.

 

Ok thanks... any recommendations on PCB design software... Design Sparks by RS?

 

Eagle is nice. I want to try DIPTrace as well. OrCad and KiCad are other popular options.
ExpressPCB might be useful if you want to slap a couple of components together fast but has limited capabilities.

 

As Brownout says, it depends on the specific application.

If you indicate the application, connector size, number of contacts, contact pitch and card length, we would have a clearer picture of your situation.

I have built many extender cards in the past and sometimes the contact pitch is a standard dimension for which blank boards are already available off the shelf.

 

Here's a pic of the board I'm looking at... hope this works!

 

Extender cards are useful for trouble shooting systems at the component level. That is, you can extend the card out of the card cage and this would allow you to scope the signals at the component pins.

I don't think a card extender is going to help you here. With a suspect card, just about the only thing you can do is swap in a good card. At this level of complexity, a bad card ends up as ewaste.

(Is Nortel still around?)

 

Here's a pic of the board I'm looking at... hope this works!

A view of the connector you wish to extend would be of much more help.