Silver easily forms an oxide which, as you have commented, is relatively
easy to remove and is not an insulator (it's also not a great conductor,
compared to the base silver). A far worse "corrosion", and one which is more
and more common east of the Mississippi, is silver sulfide, formed on
exposure to moisture and the sulfur in the air (downwind of all the
coal-fired generators in the midwest). It is much harder to remove and it is
a darned good insulator. If you store your silver-plated stuff in brown
paper bags or cardboard boxes that are still outgassing the acid left over
from the pulp-paper process, the black crap that forms will almost certainly
be silver sulfide.
For some applications, nickle or gold flashed connectors are superior to
silver. Different horses; different courses...
geo, n4ua
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Katz [mailto:stevek@jmr.com]
> Sent: Thursday, February 06, 2003 11:47 AM
> To: 'n4gi@tampabay.rr.com'; 'towertalk@contesting.com'
> Subject: RE: [TowerTalk] Coax cables
>
>
>
>
> > I'd
> > > toss those and get silver-plated connectors, which
> > > solder very quickly and
> > > easily without any rework.
> > >
> > > WB2WIK/6
> >
> > The silver ones corrode like a SOB once taken out of
> > the bag though.
> >
> > Blake N4GI
> >
> [Steve Katz] Hi Blake, funny you should say that. I
> use hundreds
> of the silver plated PL-259s annually and have never, ever seen one
> "corrode." They do oxidize and slowly tarnish (turning from
> shiny white
> silver color to kind of a tan or gray patina), which does no harm to
> anything, including the connectors themselves. Actually,
> silver oxide is
> scrubbed off immediately by the flux in the solder, and I've
> found tarnished
> connectors solder on exactly as quickly and easily as shiny
> ones. If you
> have silver-plated PL-259's that actually "corroded," I'd
> sure be interested
> to see one, and see what happened to it. (And maybe also see
> who made it,
> and do a material analysis to see if it's really silver.) -WB2WIK/6
>
> >
> >
> > __________________________________________________
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