Earlier this month, Signal Hound visited ControlTek, a Vancouver, Washington-based electronics manufacturing service provider. In the electronics industry, these manufacturing service providers are often referred to as contract manufacturers, or CMs, for short. In essence, a contract manufacturer handles the production services for companies without their own manufacturing capabilities to help bring electronic products to market. In the case of Signal Hound, we can build our own boards – and indeed we do for prototyping and testing purposes – but there’s no way we can do it at scale in order to meet demand. For this very reason, we require a contract manufacturer to build our boards so we can get our RF test devices to market with little to no lead-time.
The purpose of our visit was to meet with the fantastic Neal Haarberg so he could walk us along the production line as our brand-new SM200B boards were being populated. Neal was super helpful in describing the process in detail, and it was awesome to see our engineering team’s hard work and design time come to fruition right before our eyes.
The video above doesn’t necessarily talk RF tech but will hopefully be of interest to those of you working in manufacturing, curious about electronics, or just generally interested in any how-it’s-made type of production. If you’re interested, click on through.
2 Comments
Awesome video. Demonstrates the complexity of the manufacturing process make to look easy by true industry professionals. Bravo!
Awesome and best part is “made in America”
Great video.
Keep up the good work I own multiple products from Sugna lHound