[TowerTalk] copper tank coils

[Jim Lux]

More than one engineer has been bitten by the nickel flash under the gold plating on microwave circuits - similar to the discussion in the article.  Yeah, silver plating is usually done to make it look pretty - and that isn’t often optimum for RF properties. There are plating processes that are intended for RF, but it’s specialized, and often with a much thicker plating than used for “pretty”.  You see it when silver plating aluminum (or carbon fiber) waveguides, for instance. 

One other aspect of silver plating is that it can form whiskers - I’ve not heard about it as much as tin whiskers, but that’s probably because silver plating is pretty rare these days - if you want solderability, it’s gold, usually ENIG (gold over nickel).  


On Sun, 1 Oct 2023 16:50:34 -0700, Wes <wes_n7ws at triconet.org> wrote:

This might be of interest:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/w5u2m0qvuwjs0i3vlwdsf/Plating.pdf?rlkey=n99dlrd2joh5548drtczvtsks&dl=0

Wes  N7WS

On 9/30/2023 12:38 PM, Jim Lux wrote:
> Silver plating is usually very thin, and doesn’t have a huge effect on the RF resistance.  One advantage is that silver oxide is conductive, copper oxide is lossy. Also, if you have a moving contact - silver is MUCH better than copper in terms of staying low resistance.
>
>

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