Manhattan style

Manhattan style is one popular way to build ham radio electronics. It involves small "pads", typically circular dots roughly 3 mm diameter punched out of plain copper-clad board.

The pads are super-glued onto the "substrate", a large copper-clad board. Each component is mounted right-side-up by soldering its pins to pads.

The builders try to make each pad represent one node in the schematic -- every pin that connects to that node is soldered to one pad, when possible. When it's not possible, hook-up wire is used to connect pad-to-pad and pad-to-DIP-socket-pin.

Each ground pin of a component is soldered directly to the substrate.

(FIXME: put a photograph here)

Links

 * "A Modern Breadboarding Technology: Insulating Pads Soldered to a Ground Plane"
 * K7QO's excellent description of the technique