With an ongoing requirement to save resources and to cope with component supply chain disruptions, achieving a high repair rate of electronic circuit boards becomes ever more important.

Increasing complexity of electronic circuitry, fine traces and high layer count of modern multilayer PCBs poses new challenges for repair technicians. Once a suspect net has been identified of the board (for example by using the Polar GRS200 Fault Locator), the task is now to track the net as it runs across the board, perhaps even traversing multiple layers and to identify components connected to that net.

In an electronic production environment, this information is usually available in the form of CAD data displayed on screen.

In an electronics repair centre, usually there is no CAD Data or schematic diagrams available and it is a tedious manual job to extract connectivity information from a board under test. On a PCB with hundreds or even thousands of nets, this is next to impossible and often the cause for an unsuccessful repair.

To overcome this problem, a new tool is at hand: The CT100 Circuit Trace Brush combines an audible tone generator with a conductive brush in a handy instrument. A wire with a test clip is connected to the suspect net and the brush gets gently swept across the surface of the circuit board assembly, when touching a connected PCB trace, an audible tone is produced, indicating an electrical connection. Then use the edge of the brush or the red probe to home in on the connection.

Using this method, even widely branched nets may easily be identified on most complex electronic circuit board assemblies.

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